


viewers like you

by arahir



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Celebrity Keith (Voltron), Fix-It, Humor, M/M, POV Shiro (Voltron), Pining Shiro (Voltron), Virgin Keith (Voltron), a truly epic amount of pining, as bros do, i can't convey that enough, implying only one person is pining here lmao, local man buys a weekend with his best bro at auction, tfw your confession gets video taped and posted to the galactic web, that's rough buddy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 01:44:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19819972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arahir/pseuds/arahir
Summary: It's hard to avoid the man you're in love with when his face is everywhere, but Shiro is doing his best. Of course, his first mistake was assuming Keith would let him go without a fight.“Who did this?” he asks, mostly to himself.The rest of the crew are doing an admirable and very false job of pretending to be hard at work. “This isn’t appropriate,” Shiro mutters and picks up the Keith doll to velcro its shirt closed. His fingers brush some hidden button and the doll comes alive.“You can save the Earth!” it says in someone else’s voice.Shiro closes his eyes and gathers his strength. “Whatever is going on here… it better not be.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The only reason this is published is because jo joltron messaged me at 8am with that title and life finally made sense again so if you're reading this, it's thanks to one (1) amazing gorl. 
> 
> Also this is heavily influenced by that specific brand of American commercial where you're asked to symbolically adopt a tiger or [a dinosaur tells you to recycle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ4cvR1BMyM). If you haven't been exposed to any of these, it will still make sense, but god bless your childhood.

The first ad airs on a Wednesday morning. Or, at least, that’s when Shiro sees it, but it can’t have been on long before that. He’s stuck in traffic, absently staring out the window, eyes tracing the new billboard video screen that’s up on the side of a new installation. It’s airing a brief on the weather. Television as they knew it is mostly gone. Of the three channels they get, only one is worth watching, and only because watching two alligators fall in love isn’t an easy story to abandon halfway through. 

Coran keeps a recap typed up and posted on the Garrison bulletin for everyone. 

The weather report fades into a PSA with simple English to Universal Standard phrase translations written in comic sans and then into a silent series of maps showing the updated progress of their rebuilding efforts. Same old, same old. He’s starting to regret the decision to drive, but some sense of normalcy is nice and it’s not like he gets the option to pilot every day. This is as good as it gets. 

The screen changes again. It’s not an advertisement this time, but if it’s a show, it’s higher production values than the soap opera reruns they’ve been getting. The scene opens on bars of sunlight scattering down through the canopy as the camera pans around in a wide arc and then settles on a figure standing next to a tree and comes into focus. It’s familiar. No—he knows exactly who it is.

Keith. Keith is on television.

He tries to lean out the car window, forgets it’s closed, knocks his forehead and remembers he has to unroll it. As he does, the gentle tones of flute and guitar waft down over the street, and then Keith turns to the camera. His hair is down and Shiro hadn’t realized it was that long now. It brushes his neck and shoulders where the dark grey button up has fallen open, revealing a wide swath of chest and collarbone. A gentle breeze brushes his hair, sending it scattering across his pale skin like the caress of a lover.

A wind chime sounds in the background—it’s an Olkarian instrument—as Keith starts to speak. “These trees are part of the last old growth redwood forest in North America. But with your help, we’re changing that.”

The surrealism of the moment is baffling; Shiro wonders for a moment if it's an elaborate joke or hallucination or some new alien food catching up with him. The traffic starts moving, but Shiro can barely spare a glance, lifting off the break only enough to let the car start rolling forward at two miles per hour.

“Hi,” Keith says, looking directly into the camera and Shiro’s soul by association. “I’m Keith. As a Paladin of Voltron, we fought to protect the Universe—but the battle doesn’t stop there.”

The car behind him starts honking and Shiro lets the car roll forward a few more feet as Kosmo walks into frame and bumps his head against Keith’s hip. Keith reaches down to run his long fingers through the wolf’s mane as the camera switches to B roll footage of a stream and a doe and a fawn, flowers twitching in the breeze in a clearing, an eagle landing on a treetop, all the while Keith's rough-sweet voice explaining the fragile Earth forest ecosystem and how you can help save it, today.

It ends on a close up of Keith, staring into the camera, gaze inscrutable and his own shade of gunmetal blue, half-lit by a sunbeam. The ad fades to black and a message appears. 

_Brought to you by the Voltron Coalition in partnership with the Galaxy Garrison, for a greener Earth and a more peaceful universe._

Thirty seconds later his phone dings with an incoming message, and then another, and then three more in such fast succession that the sound of the new message tone cuts itself off and starts replaying every time. He glances down, swipes to see.

_Did you see that_

_Is Keith on TV_

_What the fuck_

Shiro gets another half hour of traffic to think it over. He keys in a call to Iverson's private line, but hangs up before it can connect because he's not sure what emotion he's feeling or what he wants to ask. Maybe: Did Keith know he'd be appearing on tv? Does he know what tv is? Why that music? Why that shirt? Can I get a copy?

Or: The last time we asked Keith to do public appearances he left the team for four months or two years, depending on who you ask. What's your secret?

* * *

Keith knew. 

“I just didn't think it was a big deal.” 

Those are famous last words with him. Keith's version of a big deal is inverted to reality: him appearing on television in the Garrison's first post-war advertisement on an interplanetary broadcast as the face of Earth and humanity as a whole doesn't faze him, but god forbid anyone nickname his dog or publish an article without remember to include Shiro’s title is still Black Paladin. Those are the only two occasions he’s seen Keith animated in going on half a year of relative peace. 

Keith shrugs, leans back against the control panel. It’s one of the new ships—not for battle. Not technically. Altean tech knows how to adapt and Shiro’s one of the only ones left who knows the trick of it, the way it’s somewhere between science and magic and will. 

This is the first time they’ve spoken one-on-one in weeks, less by accident and more by design. Something between them isn’t what it was in battle and war. Civilian life—and that’s what it is now, no matter how much they’d like to not admit it—has room for all the little annoyances that were too petty to consider before and if Shiro knows one uncomfortable fact about himself, it’s that he never met a relationship he couldn’t ruin. 

He and Keith were never that, but at the first gala post-war, Keith had showed up in a ponytail and modified tux over his new and promoted Blade uniform and a smile. For fun, he’d let Keith spin him once around the dance floor. It took only that one turn to realize it was less for fun and more for ruin. Keith’s hand fit against his too tight and warm; his steps were grace and his eyes were dark. After, Shiro excused himself to the bathroom to slap water in his face and then returned and bee-lined for the open bar where he spent the next five minutes staring at the wall over the bartender's head. 

At the end of the night, he went back to his room with someone who didn't have Keith's hair or eyes or voice or grace. It didn't work. 

When Keith announced a week later that he was leaving Earth for a humanitarian mission with the Blades, it was a relief. 

It was a relief—for three days exactly, and then Shiro was forced to sit through a meeting without him and was left in the aftermath without anyone to roll his eyes at in the hallway, or run interference, or set a hand on his shoulder and remind him Atlas was the name of his ship and not his role in life. Everyone wants a pound of flesh and Shiro is good at giving it. Literally, he thinks, flexing the metal arm and turning it back and forth as he settles his gaze somewhere that isn't on the cut on Keith's forehead. It's new—something he got off-world between filming his commercial and trying to help the universe.

“If you don't want them to use it, you don't need to feel obligated—”

“Shiro, it's fine.” Keith grins, huffs a little laugh. “It's easy.” Everything to him is easy now. “Besides—I wanted to do something.” 

It is something. A pair of Puigians got their hands on a piece of Olkarion tech and some contraband pine cones and tried growing their own little forest outside the west end of the market after Keith's ad aired, which might have been fine if it wasn't in the middle of a salt flat. It didn't go so well, but they got the spirit of it and that was all Keith. 

“...I'm proud of you,” Shiro says, and pulls him in by the shoulder, a one-armed hug that Keith leans into. Proud. It's the word Shiro's started using in place of every other. It's better than _I miss you_ or _we should go flying some time, just the two of us,_ and it's leaps and bounds past _I'm seeing someone, and he doesn't talk like you, he doesn't taste the way I think you would._

“Thanks,” Keith says into his shoulder. “I hope it pissed Lance off.”

Shiro laughs as they pull apart. “Of course. He tried to get the Garrison to let him film one with those mermaids, but Allura axed it.” 

Keith rolls his eyes and then a beeper goes off. They both look down to check, and then Keith pulls his out of a tight-to-skin pocket and waves it. “Sorry. I think I'm late.” He’s about to walk out when he pauses and turns back to Shiro. It’s a look he’s never given before, a full up and down that makes Shiro feel like he shouldn’t move or breathe. “We’re doing another shoot,” he says. “...You should come.”

The offer is so out of left field that for a moment Shiro thinks he’s imagined it, but no. Keith is still standing there, still staring, still waiting for an answer.

“I couldn’t,” Shiro laughs, unsure why, but sure that this is a step too far. “Where are you going?”

“The beach.”

* * *

That second ad is where it all starts to go to hell. 

It airs in the same slot as the first. Shiro is in the mess at the time, mid-conversation with three of the bridge crew, facing the new and larger television screen they installed the week before. The comic sans public service announcements start rolling and Shiro realizes with shame that he can feel a tickle of excitement up his spine. He's Pavlov's dog for comic sans and a sustained glimpse of Keith where no one—not even his own head—can shame him for looking.

No wind chimes this time, and no forest. It opens on a beach at midday and Shiro gets only one second to remember Keith’s offer, before the sight of Keith in skin tight surf leggings and nothing else manifests on the screen before them in near to life sized glory. The leggings have purple stripes over the calf and hip; Shiro traces them all the way up, until the peek of abs above the waistband gives him something else else to follow. By the time he reaches Keith's face, he knows his mouth is open in a rictus of horror, but he can't stop it. Water glistens over his body, drips down his skin.

An officer off to the side whistles lowly. Shiro makes a mental note to add inappropriate comments about a superior officer to the man's file.

Keith’s hair is down again. Someone's set sunglasses on top of his head to push his bangs off his forehead, or maybe that's what he wears these days. Maybe he surfs, too. Maybe he's always surfed.

Shiro doesn't know who this is, but he wants to.

“Hi,” Keith says, low, rough, and sweet. “I'm Keith. As one of the Paladins of Voltron, we fought to keep the Earth safe for future generations. Right now the Earth is at risk.”

The camera pulls back and the beach scene loses its purity. There's garbage strewn across the entire span. Stock footage of Keith helping a crab stuck in an empty yogurt cup transitions into Keith pulling rings of plastic off a struggling bird as his voice over outlines the basics of reduce, reuse, recycle, before the camera flips back to him.

Now he's kneeling in the sand. He picks up a single plastic bag and then stands, holding it for the camera. His look says, _I'm not mad at you all. I'm just disappointed._ It makes Shiro feel as if he physically walked to the beach and wrapped said bag around the head of a baby seal. He's a demon. All people are demons. Keith is the sunlight-limned god sent to punish them.

“We can do better. And with your help, we _can_ save the Earth.” 

It's so cheesy, but his delivery is unself-conscious and presumes nothing but honest dedication to the cause. Now the camera pulls back and the music soars as more strings join the simple guitar and the pan reveals the beach has been miraculously stripped of trash. The camera speeds as it fades to black and the now familiar message appears.

No one speaks once it's over, but the MFEs are at the same table. A loud thump rattles the silverware and Shiro looks over in time to see James bring his forehead down again before Kinkade and Rizavi grab him. “It’s not worth it, man,” Kinkade tells him as James shakes his head.

It's a mood.

* * *

The thing is, the ad works. No one wants to talk about it but the Galra decimated, took, and ruined in their time on Earth. And Keith is right—this is something. A week later, Shiro takes his off day to make the hour drive out to the ocean and sit on the shore and think about nothing. It’s nice. The beach is nice. The trash cans are full, but someone's tied a couple empty bags to the outside. There's a gaggle of humans and aliens taking pictures of a seal that's sunning itself on a rock. It's just a seal, Shiro wants to say. That's all.

What it comes down to is a knee jerk thing, an ugly wriggle of jealousy. Of course, Keith can save the Earth, but he's always saved Shiro first. And now Shiro doesn't even know what he wants saving from. Mundanity, maybe. A life with someone who's bland and perfect to be sure, but not what he wants. Not what he needs. Some fellow officer or a civilian man who does something domestic, a hard worker, a _good person_. 

He doesn’t want a good person, he realizes little by little. He wants someone just so. Not too hot, not too cold—just right. Just _easy_. Something that was only ever his, could only be for him—something so wondrous it’s like the universe made it just for him.

Keith meets him every night as he's sitting down for dinner, dripping water, and greets him every morning with his guitar backdrop. The universe is wondrous, he seems to say, and so are you, if only you'd try.

Shiro tries. Shiro has been trying for years. 

It's another two months before he sees Keith again, time skipping by him. They release another ad in that time, one where Keith—tight t-shirt explains the differences between aluminum, plastic, and paper when recycling. It's mundane except that the cadence of his voice as he describes what plastic feels like is enrapturing in a way that horrifies. 

More posters pop up around the city. They start informative and then devolve into an exercise in what’s clearly futility. The differences between types of plastic and how to recycle turns into a sign describing the differences between a dog and a coyote, why one is suitable as a pet and one not, and then another joins it which describes animals that can swim versus animals that can’t and why most should be left alone to figure it out for themselves. That one gets pasted over with a more basic 101 on how to identify animals that can’t survive on land and should be left in the water entirely. It’s accompanied by a picture of a shark that’s a little too generous in the smile department, but hopefully gets the point across. Most include an image of Keith pointing to something or standing with noble posture on one side. Sometimes Kosmo is there, sometimes not. Shiro would give anything to have been a fly on the wall of the stock photo shoot. 

The entire endeavor looks like the Galaxy Garrison is playing whack-a-mole with the entire universe and Shiro is here to watch it all through the lens of Keith’s perfect hair, tight-fit clothing, and gentle smile. Every ad he reads in Keith’s voice in his head. 

Sometimes he doesn’t have to imagine it at all. At their monthly dinner, Keith calls in. His hair is longer than it was now—long enough to tie back, though enough falls around his face that it almost looks affected.

“We’re doing another add,” he tells them after Lance ribs him for the last one. 

“Is it on mermaid planet?” Lance leans across the table to ask this, and Keith leans back on the screen, laughs a little.

“Yep. Sure is.”

“Oh, oh my god—” Lance almost stands, realizes Allura is there and swallows and nods to her. “We should both go. The two of us. To see the mermaids.” 

On the other end of the line, Keith laughs. “I’m kidding. It’s a planet with dragons. Floating rocks.” He pauses. “You should come.” The screen is small, but it’s set in front of Shiro and he can tell when Keith is looking at him. He could feel that gaze a light year away, it seems. “All of you,” he says as an afterthought.

Were he a better man, he would say yes. A sweet invite from a friend, a chance at a vacation, a beautiful place with beautiful people—but he’s not a better man, and Keith’s skin looks sun-kissed and glorious and Shiro would like to touch it more than a friend should. He nods his head at Keith but keeps it vague and sees the light die a little in Keith’s eyes as he sees the response for what it is. “I’ll check my schedule,” he says, the pinnacle of lameness even to his own ears.

Keith’s smile becomes tight and false. 

Something between them is rifting. It shouldn’t be his fault, can’t be his fault, but it is. He ignores it, lays into his dinner, and lets the conversation ebb around the solid silence between the two of them.

* * *

Shiro can’t make it to the shoot. None of them can, but the rest of the team know the invitation was meant for one person and one person only. A new class is incoming and no one knows what ship to assign where. The Atlas is spread thin, accomplishing a hundred odd jobs for its one captain. No—Admiral, now. He keeps forgetting. Only Keith’s occasional messages addressed to _Admiral Shirogane_ are a stark reminder.

Keith invites him three more times, to three more shoots. Shiro refuses each one. He’s busy. He can’t find the time. He can’t justify taking a week to spend time with his best friend—not when that best friend has become a flashpoint of desire. Keith’s calls get more sparse from there out, even as he becomes omnipresent. It’s the oddest torture and it builds and builds. Someone leaves an action figure on the control panel in the Atlas one morning. The little, pale Keith has a removable shirt and synthetic hair that can be pushed and pulled. It’s longer than it is in reality, he thinks, and then realizes he has no one of knowing. Keith could have a braid now. His hair could be purple, the way it is on the doll, too, for all Shiro knows. The doll comes with a Kosmo. Both can be moved and positioned. Someone—maybe whoever left them, presumably there have been modifications post-placement—has set Keith so he’s riding the wolf like a child riding a pony. 

“Who did this?” he asks, mostly to himself. 

The rest of the crew are doing an admirable and very false job of pretending to be hard at work. “This isn’t appropriate,” Shiro mutters and picks up the Keith doll to velcro its shirt closed. His fingers brush some hidden button and the doll comes alive.

“ _You can save the Earth!_ ” it says in someone else’s voice. 

Shiro closes his eyes and gathers his strength. “Whatever is going on here… it better not be.” 

And, well, if he keeps it on his desk in his quarters, what no one knows can’t hurt them. 

* * *

A Kosmo joins it two weeks later, and then a miniature Voltron and not-so-miniature Atlas, found in a compromising position he can’t begin to fathom the logistics behind—though he does spend the better half of the rest of that day trying to imagine it, against his better judgment.

Someone he never identifies goes the extra mile and manages to find a little figure of Shiro himself decked in purple with a light up arm from his time as Champion. It makes sense the Galra would market his image and if it should be painful, it’s somehow not. Seeing himself like this makes it humorous. That time he was a gladiator and got experimented on by aliens for a year. What’s a year, in the scheme of things, really? he thinks with something between bitterness and serenity. He wonders if he can make a claim for royalties and sets the figure off to the side of the rest, leaned against the Kosmo, which is soft and stylized and glows electric blue in the dark. It might be irradiated, actually. He hasn’t had the guts to check because checking means he would have to check his arm as well and he doesn’t really want to know what life has in store for him where radiation levels are concerned.

Then again, with the arm, maybe he’s immune to it. Maybe, after everything they’ve been through, it doesn’t matter. He’s probably had enough gamma radiation to kill a whale, and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. 

The old, tired mantra seems mocking, but he repeats it to himself daily as his gallery of Keiths watch over him in solitude when he works into the night on his stack of papers that never lessens, never eases. Read and sign and annotate, highlight, scribble over, double and triple check. 

_You can save the Earth,_ he thinks in the little Keith’s high-pitched, grating voice.

At a meeting two weeks later, three aliens with six tentacle arms each and eyes on stalks somehow manage to convey a frown when they see Shiro sit down across the table. “We thought the Red Paladin would be in attendance.”

“He was… busy.” They hadn’t thought to ask Keith, actually. Hadn’t known his presence would be _demanded_. Evidently celebrity is a thing sought out the universe over.

The aliens make a noncommittal sound and share a long, tall glance between themselves. 

“—But he sends his regards and his hope that an agreement can be reached,” Shiro attempts. 

The glances pause, the aliens look up at him, and then their leader gives a tentative nod. This is acceptable, it seems to say, and Shiro wishes with all his soul in that moment that Keith were still there to share a glance in kind, to laugh with him about it after, to back him up in whatever decision he decided to make—because he always did. Without fail, no matter what it was, he knew one person was in his corner and a force to be reckoned with all his own. He doesn’t have that now. 

That’s it. For every invitation Keith makes, for every invitation Shiro is forced to refuse, that’s the part that nibbles at him. Keith left first. Keith left, and Shiro is where he always was, but minus his right hand twice over. When the realization hits, he has to cover his mouth with his human hand and try not to make a sound, because that’s _it._

He’s in love with his best friend, and guilty with it, and sad with it, and alone with it because his best friend isn’t there anymore. It’s not a fair assessment, not a circumspect way of looking at the situation, but it’s honest. It’s the one truth that follows him home at night, chases him down to sleep, is standing by his door when he wakes up alone, with another day of this ahead of him—another week, another month, the rest of his life.

The work he loves. He pours all of himself into it. He never thought he would have to do it alone, though. 

At least in space no one can hear you scream.

* * *

“We’re thinking of doing a charity drive.”

For a moment, he thinks it’s going to be Keith on the other line, but it’s Allura’s face that greets him. It’s his first call from anyone on that side of things in the better part of a month. In their absence, three more ads have popped up, and two more Kosmos have joined his unfortunate menagerie. He takes the call in his office rather than his quarters, because there’s less of a chance he’ll accidentally expose whoever’s on the line to the insanity. The flaw in the plan is that the Garrison office is, well, Garrison property, and subject to Garrison rules, which seem to be that at least one wall in every room needs to be graced with the image of their literal poster boy. 

_Oceans versus Lakes: How to Tell the Difference_ stares at him from the back of his own office door, complete with Keith who’s implied to be explaining what salt water and tides are, in all his glory. It’s an underrated scene—him in the Paladin armor with the helmet under his arm. A favorite, if Shiro had to choose. For that reason, Shiro usually leaves the door open and the image hidden, but he wanted privacy for this. 

Allura sees it as Shiro’s milling around the room. “Oh, I get a kick out of that one,” she says. “Did you see the one with the dogs?”

Everyone saw the one with the dogs. _What are Dogs and Why?_ it was titled. Kosmo got to read that one. 

“Yeah. They had to post it up on the side of the new lighthouse. There was a whole group of kids keeping a coyote pack down by the docks. ...Or maybe the other way around."

Allura laughs. “I don’t know if it makes any difference. Some days it feels like we’ll be at this forever.”

“Probably, but if it does something, that’s enough.” That’s what he tells himself with every signed paper, every piece of minutiae that passes his desk, every minor rescue the Atlas is called in to make. Allura has made her mission diplomacy, and she’s better at it than any of them could have dreamed. All the nuance, kindness, cunning, and ferocity it takes, she manages in spades. Shiro’s had the luck to see her in a few negotiations. Saying she was born for it feels like a discredit—she’s earned it, and earns it more and more each day. 

It’s almost a comfort to hear that she has his same doubts. It seems like they’re all doing their best. They’re throwing everything they’ve got at everything that comes their way and hoping even one percent of it sticks. 

“You know, he doesn’t hate doing these, but I still feel bad. Someone asked him for an autograph the other day and I thought he would jump out the window to get away.” 

Shiro tries to imagine it and snorts. “Of all the people you could have put out there…”

“I know, I know. But you have to admit, he looks the part. And at least it’s not me. Or Lance. Can you imagine?”

“He would love it.” 

“Oh, I know.”

They share a moment and then her tone changes. “The charity drive…”

“If you need donations, you know I’ll do what I can.”

“No, no. It’s not that. It’s, well. It’s going to be an auction. I was wondering if you would be willing to participate. Keith told me not to ask, but—”

“I’ll do it.” The thought that Keith didn’t want him there is a hair trigger he hadn’t realized he had. He compartmentalizes, sets it aside, resolves to examine the cut the revelation leaves when he has time to nurse it with something stronger than the glass of water on his desk. “Do you need help setting up? The Atlas is probably a little too big to fit in, but it might go for—”

His joke falls flat as her lips purse in the approximation of a smile. “No. It’s not that. It’s, well. A date. We were hoping to auction off a date with you.”

“A date. Me.” He thinks of the last four he attempted and wants to throw himself out the window. Maybe Keith had the right idea keeping him away, but maybe it wasn’t his place. 

She nods and her eyes turn to skeptical half-moons. “It’s fine if you’d rather not.”

He imagines it. Being bid on by strangers, having to spend a day with someone he doesn’t know. Anyone could bid. There’s an element of the unknown to it, but it almost can’t be worse than his love life before now has been—and if it’s for charity, it’s not even expected to be real. “I’ll do it.” Her eyes widen. “No—I’ll do two.”

They work out the details, and he tries to convince himself it’s going to go well. He would have agreed anyway, but there’s some extra element to it, some odd feeling he can’t identify. To console himself, he imagines Keith’s face when he finds out Shiro agreed. In his mind, he can’t decide whether Keith would look shocked or relieved or angry.

Maybe none of it. Maybe he wouldn’t care at all. Somehow that’s worse. 

* * *

They make a porno, too.

Actually, they make three. In the first, a Galra who doesn't quite have Keith's build or color but who is wearing a Blade uniform and a passable wig pushes into a winsome boy with lank brown hair. He's human, but someone's stenciled blue marks on his skin that look nebulously exotic, and there are a number of fine gold chains draped around his body, presumably for the aesthetic.

“You like that?” pseudo-Keith asks in a tone that suggests he's not really looking for an answer. The voice is spot on. Replicators are a curse. 

The boy under him squeals.

“Is that what it looks like, you think?” Lance asks, gesturing to the part of the scene Shiro's eyes have been doing their best to not notice. Now, he can't look anywhere but at the length of ribbed and pebbled purple moving in and out and in and—

Shiro reaches out and cancels the feed. “That's disgusting.”

Pidge snorts and wrests the datapad out of Lance's hands. “That's the circle of life.” Shiro hopes not. “Wait, there's one more.”

The second one is different. The second one is worse.

It opens on a beach scene—the beach from the ad. “Oh, god,” Hunk says. “James told me about this.”

Several questions pop up behind Shiro's eyes in short succession before he dismisses them. The waves lap at the shore. It's a holodeck generation, Shiro realizes. As they watch, Keith enters the scene. This one is better; they must have touched him up digitally, because the looks are uncanny. Shiro spares a moment to be grateful that he's memorized the way Keith moves, too, just by proximity and years of shared training. That can't be faked and it helps put some distance between the two so that when the monstrosity of tentacles rises out of the sea and latches onto Keith, Shiro's heart doesn't totally stop in his chest.

It's consensual, at least. 

“So he's saving their species by letting it—”

“Don't. Don't say it.” It is a surprisingly environmentally friendly message. 

The Keith on the screen cries out over the _schlorp schlorp_ of writhing tentacles. Shiro jerks in place because it's a cry he's heard Keith make before and because this time, instead of pinging his protective instinct, the sound goes somewhere else entirely. The collars on the new uniforms are too tight, the cloth too warm. Shiro shifts in place.

“Please,” Keith begs. 

It pulls up half a memory he didn't know he had, sitting in a cockpit with Lotor passed out beside him, splitting headache making it impossible to do more than watch his limbs move, Keith's pleas over the radio the inescapable soundtrack of that moment. He doesn't ask for much, but he's said that word to Shiro half a hundred times in pain and under duress. 

On screen now, the octopus is going something unspeakable to a part of Keith they can't see—only because Shiro has covered it with his hand. “Please,” he repeats and Shiro's blood beats out a litany: _Yes, of course, for you, anything._ “Please, Mister Octopus, give me your—”

This time Lance ends the feed.

No one speaks for a moment. No one wants to look—not at the screen, not at the far wall where Keith's postered visage is pasted against a rocky shore, staring into the distance with the sun in his hair 

“Wow,” Pidge says faintly, finally. She takes her glasses off and wipes them. “Technology, huh? Incredible. I wonder how they animated the—the appendages.”

“It's real.” Everyone turns to Hunk. “I think they're from the Karthulian System. You can ask James about it, he uh. He knows more than I do.”

Of course.

The third Shiro finds on his own after his second glass of whiskey, alone in his rooms past midnight on a Friday. The date he had at five went as well as he expected, which wasn't very. The production values are lower. No beach, no creatures, no make up. The actors don’t even look as much the part as they should, but in some ways that makes it worse. 

It opens on a gym at night. This one is filmed on Earth; human locker rooms are unique and universal the Earth over. It wouldn’t have been hard to find one. The uniforms, though. If they’re not Garrison issue, they’re a fair approximation. Both are the grey of an officer, the same rank. The smaller has dark hair and the larger man’s face can’t be seen—but his hands are massive against the small waist of Keith’s stand-in, and when he flips Keith on his back and tears open the Garrison-issue belt and pants, Keith sighs. It’s not his real voice and not close, but it’s rough and it’s real. The whole thing is meant to ruin. By the end of it, the Keith is naked and sweat-soaked over the bench and the unseen officer has him sobbing for it. 

Shiro realizes he’s hard and realizes he’s had too much to drink and tries not to blame himself when he slips a hand into his sweats and brings himself off in lazy strokes. It’s not really Keith and this isn’t really them, isn’t really their dynamic, isn’t really what either of them wants. 

If it was really them, he would be nervous. Not too nervous to act, but it would be somewhere private. Off world, maybe, in the desperate quiet of some no-name ship, and Keith wouldn’t cry. He would laugh and pull Shiro in and the nervousness would melt away with pleasure and joy and sweat and heat.

When he comes, it’s the kind of rolling climax that shudders through him for seconds, on and on. 

In the morning, he deletes his history and pretends it was a dream.


	2. Chapter 2

The auction is a bigger affair than expected. Bigger—as on the scale of things in a post intergalactic Earth. 

Signs that Shiro might be in over his head are subtle: the red carpet, the beam lights arcing up into the sky, and the crowd. It seems a ridiculous effort to make for a charity auction that would once have been held in a high school auditorium, but they're not using the red carpet for much else these days, he guesses. The high school auditoriums have been mostly relegated to refugee centers.

He shows up after the rush and for the first moment is unsure what he’s agreed to.

“Do I have the wrong place?” Shiro asks when he walks up to the gold rope barrier outside of the theater.

Keith's hair and the curve of his back are dead giveaways of who he’s talking to. He's doing something on his phone, staring down at it. His gaze turns on a dime and goes from shocked to some unnamable thing that looks like relief but shouldn't be. "You came." He holds up the phone. Shiro's image is displayed on it. Calling him, Shiro realizes, but his phone was set to silent. "I wasn't sure you would,” Keith says. He notices Shiro on the wrong side of the barrier and frowns. "We could have sent a car."

"I like walking." 

Keith snorts at that. "Ok, old man. Come on."

The room is decked out like an awards ceremony rather than the small-time charity auction it must be. The theater is packed from wall to wall—there’s standing room in the back that it looks like they’ll have to fight their way through—but he needn’t have worried. When they try to sneak in around the side, the crowd spots him and Keith and they send up a cheer like the two of them have just stepped out of the Black Lion after defeating Zarkon yet again. He feels as if he’s back in his pilot suit and not dressed in a tux he bought for the occasion at a heavy discount. 

Seeing the stage gives him heart palpitations, but Keith squeezes his shoulder from behind and moves off to some hidden door. “We’ll call you,” he says and motions to a door Shiro hadn’t noticed. It’s on the side, made for hidden exits and entrances. Shiro ducks inside and finds a world in chaos. Allura is organizing it all, datapad in hand, gaze of iron well in place as she surveys everyone. It softens when she sees Shiro. She motions him to a chair that looks like something off a movie set and he props himself in it, praying for a moment he won’t have to leave for the night.

He’s not so lucky, of course. 

Soon they’re calling him to the stage and even the low call of his name from Allura’s lips gives him heart palpitations. No—not really. It’s not until he’s out on it that it starts to hit him, but someone must have warned them about his aversion to a room full of strangers staring at him like a display specimen because the house lights stay on and the spotlight never hits him. He chances a glance at Allura, smiling, and Allura returns it, but then the bidding starts and he can’t see anything at all.

They start it at a meagre hundred. “Do I hear a hundred and fifty?” the auctioneer asks, some faceless Olkarion he didn’t get a good look at. 

A large Galra raises his hand. Two thousand. An alien Shiro can't immediately identify because it appears to be wearing a novelty cowboy hat as if it’s high fashion raises it to five. Then, someone wearing a Garrison junior officer's outfit raises it to six, and that's where it starts to fall apart. Shiro doesn't want that, would specifically like to avoid it all costs, come to think. It might be against Garrison regulations. It’s certainly worth a demerit. Before he can decide if he should object, the Galra ups it by an even ten thousand and now there's a growl to his voice, like he's daring anyone else to bid. 

Shiro darts a glance at Allura that he hopes says, _Please tell me you vetted everyone here._

She nods at him encouragingly in what he hopes is a way that means, _Yes, of course_ , though it more than likely is just her way of saying, _You're doing great, sitting there and saying nothing, looking pretty._

He supposes he should be glad they didn't make him wear a tight shirt this time.

The bidding goes back and forth that way for a shameful amount of time and the reality that he's going to have to spend a full day with one of these people starts to set in. It's grim. Part of him is dizzy with the attention, wishes suddenly that he were anywhere else, though he’s no stranger to it. He makes himself take a breath, focus somewhere on the wall in the distance, though it seems hazy somehow.

It starts to level off at thirteen thousand. The Galra raises it to fifteen, and for a moment that seems like it will stand. 

“Going once? Going twice…” 

“Twenty thousand,” someone new says. 

Shiro’s breath catches. The voice isn’t one that immediately registers—but it does a few seconds later, after the bidding has left him behind and moved on to twenty-two thousand and a hundred, do they hear twenty-two thousand. The previous bidders all share a series of looks. The Galra looks like he's contemplating it and starts to raise his hand again when Keith’s disembodied voice breaks the silence.

"Fifty thousand."

An even fifty. Even with the lights on, Shiro can’t spot Keith in the crowd. Can’t spot him at that moment, can’t spot him later when his voice sounds out those four syllables. It’s clear as a bell. His voice has always been a bellwether for Shiro. It still doesn’t make sense. He can’t be sure it is Keith, he tells himself, even as reality settles into his bones. This is the number the room settles on. Fifty thousand for a day with him, fifty thousand for his time and regard. 

Before Shiro can stand and argue, the next round of bidding begins. 

It doesn’t go better. It’s like watching the same bad movie twice, just to check if it was as bad as remembered. It was. It _is_. Keith stops the back and forth at another fifty and no one argues. His voice is deadpan on the delivery, as if he can’t imagine someone else will bid, as if he would drop another fortune if they tried.

A hundred thousand, in total. 

The floor drops out from beneath him, he thinks for a moment, but it’s still there. It’s his stomach that’s gone and his heart that’s in his throat. A joke. A horrible joke. It must be. He fights the reflex to laugh as he’s tugged and then a woman he doesn’t know is showing him off the stage and into the dark. His eyes take a moment to adjust. He contemplates running back out and grabbing Keith by the lapels of silk tuxedo and—

And he’s not sure, because the image overlays itself with something incomprehensible that makes him feel warm and guilty at once. 

Allura shows after a moment, but her face is pale. She doesn’t say anything. _Good joke,_ he wants to offer. _Keith, am I right?_ He meets her eyes. “I didn’t—”

 _I didn’t know he would do that._

She didn’t know either, it turns out. No one did. Shiro shakes his head and wishes he could make this something funny, but _a hundred thousand_ dollars isn’t a joke. She gives him a sympathetic, helpless smile. 

He returns it and thinks: Keith is dead. He’s absolutely dead.

* * *

_...The undersigned, heretofore referred to as the individual, has agreed to one Earth day (twenty-four hours, approximating one quintant or twenty vargas) of their exclusive time to occur two weeks from the date of signature, inclusive of events of the participant’s choosing, with the consent of the individual. This may include interstellar travel on a regulation ship with appropriate permitting, non-lethal sports, outdoor excursions, meals, and other activities, within reason. It may not include publicized events of any nature including any multi-contestant event that may fall under the label "game show."_

* * *

He doesn't get a chance to berate Keith after the auction, or even that day, or even that week. Keith is busy. Keith can't get a signal. Keith is offworld. _Golly, wish I could put you in touch, Mister Shirogane, but he's not picking up calls._ In other words, he’s being avoided. On the fourth attempt, he gets mad, has a drink, and then another, and falls down a pit of searching for videos of Keith on his datapad. There are many. Some have titles with hearts and sobbing emojis. He clicks on each, dispassionately, and wishes his friend’s face would make him feel something other than frustrated.

The biggest surprise is that he isn’t angry. He should be, a thousand times over, but being angry is the easy road. Far better to be confused, which he is, desperately. 

A hundred thousand. 

All the little figures on the control panel on the Atlas suddenly seem more sinister. He picks up the newest addition—Keith in his paladin gear, cartoonish, with lurid purple bug eyes that take up half his massive plastic head. It might have been forty dollars. Can't be less than ten. 

_My money now,_ he thinks, and then realizes: no, he's not getting paid for this.

"Sir?"

Given the circumstances, isn't, in a roundabout way, Keith paying himself? That can't be legal. There have to be rules. Stipulations. He's read the contract front to back at least half a dozen times, but once more can't hurt—

"Sir, do we have orders?"

The entire bridge is staring at him. 

Correction: the entire bridge is staring at him, staring at an exaggerated doll of his best friend on a Monday afternoon, at the control panel of the greatest interstellar ship ever created by science or magic.

Shiro sets the little Keith back in his row and straightens himself up. "Right. We're headed for a relief mission in the Eridani system. This is humanitarian. You all have your mission briefs. There's no reason to expect a fight, but stay on your toes. You represent the Galaxy Garrison and Earth while you’re on this ship and off it. We don't have a set return yet, but we can expect to be offworld for a week at least."

A week. He almost trips through the rest of his pre-mission speech. A _week_. It could go longer, and the auctioned dates are set back to back a week from that day.

He checks his communicator one more time. No missed calls, no missed messages. Well, fine. If that's how Keith wants to play this, he can make Keith come get him. He can make Keith come a whole twenty light years to collect his prize. It's only fair.

* * *

"There's a ship hailing us." 

Eridani B is what they called it in Earth, when they named it from compiled high resolution photographs of the night, caught by telescope. The Eridanians call it something else entirely, something that Shiro tries desperately to learn to pronounce in those first days, before he mangles it one too many times and starts questioning his worth as admiral. They try writing it out to figure out an easier way of saying it, but it's entirely vowels. 

The planet itself is delightful. It's a beatific series of farming communities set against rolling hills and lakes, the image marred only by the fact that the water is black and the soil is red and whatever they're farming, it looks like a plant that hates existence itself. The fruits are between brown and orange and covered in what's either hairs or spikes or fungus.

It's not clear what Zarkon wanted with the planet, but marks of his subjugation and subsequent abandonment are everywhere.

A week in, they still have more work to do. They might extend the mission to two or even three weeks, Shiro thinks optimistically—but of course, a week in, Keith arrives like clockwork. Shiro's on the bridge when the call comes in. They left the Atlas in orbit around Eridani—it's unlikely they would appreciate giant robot footprints in their fields —and shuttled down supplies and volunteers. 

"Put them through,” Shiro says, as if he doesn’t know who it is.

Keith's image appears on the main screen. A non-regulation tittering wells up around the room until Shiro sends them all a sidelong glance. 

"Hello Atlas," Keith says, sweet and sour, eyes like fire, skin glowing ethereally in the cockpit light of his ship. "Requesting permission to land?"

The hangar is already open for him. Shiro did it with a thought and felt the great doors open like they were a part of him. Now, he thinks of asking Keith for his identification code, or saying no and making him land on the surface of Eridani and shuttle in, as is protocol. He doesn't. He can’t. A terrible part of him he'd forgotten about until that moment is puppy-joyous at the sight of Keith, at the lilt of his words. 

It’s not a part of himself he can fight.

"Welcome aboard, Keith," he hears himself say in a voice that rings with triumph and hates himself just a bit.

Keith nods at him and then the image blips out to black and Shiro takes a moment to reel himself in, to remind himself that he’s _mad_ and that the ten-point list he's been curating of the reasons Keith's actions were irresponsible and unwarranted is spiffed up and ready to go, memorized, even. No one gives a lecture like Shiro gives a lecture. He's almost excited for it, he thinks as he makes his way to the hangar. 

It crumbles and falls from his mind the moment he sets eyes on Keith.

The ship he brought is one Shiro has ever seen before, he realizes. It can't be Galra-made—too slick, not ominous enough, not purple enough. It's red, to begin with. Perfect, spit-fire and glorious red. It _looks_ fast, like a car you would never buy unless you expected to get pulled over. Whatever he expected, it’s not this, but of course Keith wouldn't show up in some salvaged Galra transport or a borrowed Garrison ship or the Black Lion. And, of course, the first thing he would buy if he had the money would be a ship all his own.

"What do you think?" Keith asks.

He looks like someone who would fly a ship like that. Like something out of a movie, which Shiro guesses he might as well be at this point. Hair down, leather jacket over a black shirt and black jeans. Unassuming and beautiful in simplicity, as if all the adornment he’ll ever need is the shine of his eyes and the cut of his jawline and yes, now Shiro remembers why he ran halfway across the Galaxy to get away from this. 

"She's perfect,” Shiro says, letting himself focus on the ship instead. 

Keith nods. "You remember those swap moons Coran was always trying to get us to go to? Turns out they sell just about everything." He grins. "Thought you'd like her. All packed?"

Shiro feels his own smile crack. "No, why?"

It's worth it see Keith flounder a moment. "Because—"

"Oh, because you bombed the charity auction? And didn't pick up your phone for a week?" On one hand he can count the number of times he's been truly angry with Keith. This, he realizes as he speaks, is one of them. “What were you thinking?” he asks, not sure he wants the answer, ignoring the little shake in his own voice. It was embarrassing. To be on that stage, to not know what was happening or why in front of thousands of strangers and friends. 

But Keith laughs it off. “Come on. You didn’t really want to get stuck with one of them all weekend, right?” The way his gaze settles on Shiro’s shoulder rather than his eyes is wrong. He’s lying. No—worse. He’s making it up on the spot because he didn’t think he would have to lie. He thought Shiro would be fine with this—would thank him for the favor. “I thought you would be happy,” Keith says, and Shiro lets himself take a bitter pride in that even a year gone, he can read Keith like a book. 

“I’m always happy to see you.” He will be, until the end of time, but a hundred thousand dollars is as much as the Garrison pays an Admiral in a year and Keith blew it on _nothing._ “I just want to understand why you would do something this _stupid_ —”

Wrong word. 

Keith’s face stills to ice in an instant, emotion flooding his eyes for a breath before they go carefully blank. “We’re wasting time,” he says after a moment, not quite monotone, and turns toward the open door of the ship. “I bought the weekend and—”

“Don’t. Don’t do this.”

“It's my choice,” Keith says flippantly. “Whatever I want, right?” He sounds like the kid Shiro bailed out of juvenile detention, full petty, ready to assume the world is against him and Shiro, too. Shiro has to remind himself the ball is in Keith’s court where an apology is concerned and owed.

“Not _whatever_. Within reason—”

Keith shoots him a look. “I paid a hundred thousand for a weekend with you. It's my choice.” He doesn't say date, doesn't use the words but this can't—it can't not be. It was sold as a date. Surely, even for Keith, this can only be one thing. No one does this for a friend. No one would do what Keith has done for him for a _friend._ Or a brother. 

"I don't think kidnapping was in the contract."

"Good thing you're not a kid, then," Keith snaps without looking at him, messing with something on the control panel inside the door of the ship.

"At least tell me where we're going."

"Get on the ship first."

"Are we really doing this?"

Keith closes his eyes and thumps his forehead against the wall. "I will tell you if you really want me to, but can't you just trust me?"

All the frustration drains out of Shiro at that word. Trust. Of course he does. Keith is perennial. An immovable object, an unstoppable force. Not trusting Keith is like not trusting the sun to rise or that the Earth is round. 

"I trust you." 

* * *

If the outside of the ship is slick, the inside is utilitarian perfection. Two modest bedrooms with a shared bathroom, a cargo bay that looks like it’s been half signed over to Kosmo, a small kitchen and sitting area, and a cockpit. It has two chairs. Shiro spares a moment to wonder why Keith would want a model with a copilot seat and banishes it from his mind. He really hasn’t packed anything—he figured he would make Keith wait for that, because he could—but it seems like a concession to get off the ship after he made such a big deal getting on it. Keith glibly tells him it’s fine, he has clothes that will fit, and Shiro files the questions that raises away with the implication of the copilot’s seat and throws both out the window. 

Who Keith sees isn’t his business. At least there’s no other evidence of it on the ship that he can see. It’s spotless. 

Shiro flatters himself that Keith would clean for him, but maybe this is Keith now. The only thing that kept him from making a mess on the Castleship was the lack of—anything. They didn’t bring anything, didn’t pick up anything. Except for Pidge’s room, but they like not to talk about that.

A few pictures are pinned to the wall around the cockpit. His own face stares back at him here and there. Photos from before Kerberos—from the day of take off. The Holts had their pictures taken by someone who wouldn't send a copy to the Galaxy Garrison publicity office and offered to take a few of Shiro and Keith, too. Those were the first days after the break up. Adam hadn't shown at the launch. Adam had been uninvited. He remembers being surprised at his own pettiness and then forgetting about it entirely in his own excitement and how it was reflected in Keith's eyes twice over.

They were both young. It feels like a lifetime ago. Shiro still hasn't figured out how to count the years. Can he subtract time for being mostly dead? Does Keith’s time away count for double?

He banishes the thought as Keith settles in the pilot's seat and then motions for Shiro to sit beside him. "It's not a Lion, but it's not bad,” he says, as if in apology. 

Not bad is an understatement. It's luxury class. The seats are leather or some synthetic approximation that’s better than the real thing. Keith starts flicking switches and going through the checklist that's a reflex to them both by now, a muscle memory. Taking off when a ship is already in space has none of the drama of taking off under the pull of gravity and the weight of an atmosphere, but a part of him will always thrill at it despite.

Beyond Atlas's hangar sits the wide emptiness and nothing but. It's maybe the first time since they left Earth that Shiro has had the time to admire space in all its vastness. It’s beautiful. Always was, always will be, but now the thought of it inspires something cold in him, in the very pit of his stomach, a kind of anxiety. 

"You know, I always figured you'd go running off to space after everything. See the stars,” Keith murmurs as the ship starts to lift off. 

"I saw a lot of them. I still do."

"Shiro, this is Atlas's first offworld mission in six months and you only took it to get away from me."

Shiro leans back. That's not fair. Atlas could spend a decade offworld any not make a dent in the universe's problems Earth is centralized—it's taking on all the problems where they come home to roost. 

Keith shifts in place and glances at Shiro out of the corner of his eye. "Are you really mad at me?"

The insecurity in his voice hurts secondhand. "No. I just think it's weird you paid a hundred thousand to see your friend when you could have done it for free."

"...Could I?"

"Yes. You—Keith, _you_ left. You went away." Shiro is a stationary object. Keith is the one that swings wild, a comet bound to form and gravity.

Keith still won’t look at him. “I wanted you to come with me.” 

He didn’t mean to say that. Shiro can tell by the surprise in his eyes, morphing to horror and then to defiance. The hum of the ship around them, the _click click click_ of the thousand machines that keep it working in tandem the only sound in that silence. It’s a sound he missed. The Atlas is almost quiet, but even the Lions had a voice. 

“You didn’t ask,” Shiro says when it's clear Keith won’t say anything else, and tries not to make it sound resentful.

Keith sits up, eyes snapping to Shiro with something like hurt. “I did. I did, later. And you wouldn’t have said yes anyway.” 

It’s in him to argue, but no. Keith is right, even if he doesn’t know why. That reality—the two of them running away across the universe—isn’t one Shiro could let himself dream of. Even now, the image is too wrapped up in the hundred thousand little pieces of this that he needs to tell himself are less than they are, all the devotion, all the moments in pain and solitude when the first image that comes to his mind is Keith’s face. 

“I’m here now,” Shiro says.

“...I know.” 

Keith pushes away the hair that’s fallen in his face. It looks soft and his eyes are the color of the nebula that hangs outside the cockpit window, but warm. Always warm.

And bright, Shiro realizes. Making Keith cry wasn’t in the plan at any point, but it wouldn’t be the first time Shiro rises and reaches across the distance between them to pull him up and into a hug that’s closer than any they’ve shared in years. “I just missed you,” Keith chokes into his shoulder. 

Shiro brackets the back of his neck with one hand and tries to sort out the thing that’s rising in his chest. “Sorry.” 

“No—it’s not—you shouldn’t apologize to me. Just. Do what you want for once.”

"You mean after this weekend? When my contract is up?"

Keith snorts. He didn't answer. What he wants. In a hundred years, that wouldn’t occur to him. Not now. Not after everything. A borrowed life doesn’t ask for favors, doesn’t want, doesn’t get to _be_. An image comes to him, like one of Keith’s ads. A field of somewhere sunny and green and maybe he would want that, if he could want anything. 

"Are you hungry?" Keith asks when he pulls away.

Shiro shakes his head and Keith motions to the hall beyond the cockpit. "I'm getting food. Let me know if you want anything."

Shiro nods and leans back and watches the stars wheel by.

* * *

He falls asleep in the chair and wakes up with Keith's red jacket spread over his chest. It smells like him, which has to be some scent memory ingrained so deep in Shiro it’ll be with him until the end of his days. The computer beeps again and he realizes that’s what woke him up.

 _Destination reached. Initiate landing procedures?_ the screen says.

Keith walks over just as Shiro is stretching. “You were out for hours.” 

It’s not as though being captain of the Atlas gives him time to do much aside from pilot. Someone has a question, and someone wants to know why the engines are _doing_ that, and the holodeck is acting up because Shiro had a dream about falling through space and now anyone that walks in is stuck in a rain of station debris— _can you fix it?_ Shiro shrugs and yawns again as Keith sits and turns to the control panel to turn off the autopilot and steer the ship around.

Like the rising sun, a planet dawns in the window. 

It looks like some computer generated image in a simulator’s window. Green, blue, violet—but not the shade the Galra were fond of. Brighter, sweeter. It’s vast, too. The arc of the planet’s edge glows with atmosphere and light and takes up more than half of the window. Keith is already looking down at the controls and the gentle click and whirr of the ship’s engines is the soundtrack that plays behind his vision when he remembers that moment later, as he does a thousand times. Light seems to rise off the planet, a miasmatic haze lit from within, bands of color that ebb and flow like visible wind. Shiro hears someone intake a breath, realizes it’s him when the cold air almost makes him cough.

“Where are we?”

“Barezeise,” Keith says, a nonsense word. Later, he’ll get the spelling and search it on the ship’s drive. An edge of the galaxy planet—or edge of their arm of it. 

_Unincorporated. Home to no native sentient life. In the year 2329, Earth established an unmanned post near the Hestia mountains as part of the Galaxy Garrison’s Keep Watch initiative._

“Want breakfast before we land?”

Shiro shakes his head and Keith frowns. “You need to eat.”

“I eat plenty.” 

He rolls his eyes. “I’m making breakfast. You better eat it.”

Shiro blinks at him. “Excuse me—”

“My choice, remember?” Keith says glibly and stands. Shiro follows him to the kitchen, meaning to argue, but once he’s seated and the smell of toast and eggs fills the little cabin, he realizes his mouth is watering. Without asking, Keith pushes a plate that’s so full it looks like he’ll spill if he tries to take a bite off it in front of Shiro and sits across from him at another stool. They’re both pushed up near the counter. The entire place is cozy, somehow. A window sits above the sink with something that might be a cactus set on the sill, if cacti could grow purple and red. It looks like a cottage window, like Shiro should see a white picket fence and children playing outside instead of the abyss of space. 

“Eat,” Keith urges.

Shiro does, with an eye roll of his own and Keith continues. “After I started piloting Black, I was hungry all the time. It really does take it all out of you.” 

It did. There wasn’t a day on the Castleship that Shiro wasn’t hungry. The gnawing in his gut became a resolve. A companion.

“I figured it must have been the same for you. You never said anything—” 

“We had bigger things to worry about.”

“—and I thought, if it was like that with Black, it must be ten times worse with Atlas. You _built_ that ship. How can they even pilot it without you?”

“...It’s in orbit. It just has to sit there.”

Keith’s gaze glances off his face, traces down Shiro’s arms. He took off his officer’s jacket, leaving only the tanktop beneath it. He knows the way the muscle that lines his arms sticks out. It seemed like a badge of pride, but Keith’s gaze pinches. “You should eat more.” 

“I don’t have the metabolism of a Galra.”

At this, Keith laughs. “That’s true. Still.”

Shiro counts it as a compromise that he finishes the entire plate. It makes Keith smile when he pushes it away clean and the approval in Keith’s eyes makes Shiro’s spine flare with heat. He stands to escape it. 

“You told me where we are but not why.”

Keith’s smile turns coy. He doesn’t answer as he stands and walks back to the cockpit. His grin as he leads them in for a landing makes Shiro smile in spite of himself. Flying the Atlas isn’t like flying a small craft, and flying itself is transcendent, but watching Keith fly is something else. Shiro could watch it for hours. Sometimes, he replayed Keith’s simulation runs in his spare time, a way to calm down at the end of the day, a way to gear himself up before his own flights. He finds himself gripping the seat with both hands, despite the harness across his chest. 

For a moment, the window is nothing but fire and light, and then it clears. 

Below the clouds is a forest, and it glows. Keith settles the ship in a clearing. The canopy stretches off into the distance forever, it seems.

He wonders what it says that this is the first place Keith wanted to bring him once they’re off the ship. Somewhere that’s the heart and soul of privacy. Some small part of him loosens up at the lack of pressure. It’s not like anyone is going to come across them, judge him for taking a break, for doing _nothing._ He has a contract in his back pocket that says he’s supposed to do just this and nothing else. 

As a reflex, he checks his phone for the sixth time in an hour. No messages. Nothing wrong. The Atlas doesn’t need him, and the Garrison doesn’t want him to answer for anything. Shiro wonders if Keith had something to do with this, but the man in question is busy poking around a tree. 

The device in his hand takes a moment to identify, but it must be a camera. “What are you doing?”

Keith beckons him over and points to something indistinguishable on the scale bark of the tree. “I’ve never seen this before.” 

It’s a caterpillar. It looks like every caterpillar that Shiro has ever seen before—brown, striped, squirmy—but as he watches, it changes. A subdermal glow to the caterpillar ripples up its body and back down. Keith draws in a breath. “You’re really into this. I didn’t realize…”

Keith glances up at him. “Into what?”

Shiro waves his hand nebulously at the trees and the mist and the camera in Keith’s hand. Keith frowns. 

“It’s not about the camera. It’s about—places like this.”

It might be, but Keith doesn’t do commercials about random exo-solar planets. All of his ads are about Earth, unfailingly, and if he thought it was Keith being used by the Garrison, that fabrication is far behind him. Keith wants this. Keith lives in the spotlight better than Shiro ever did. “The Earth doesn’t look like this,” Shiro says, trying to order why this frustrates him. It’s mystifying. Keith left the Earth for this, he thinks, and knows what he really means is: 

_Keith left me for this._

It feels like a punch and then it doubles in on itself when Keith replies, “Well, I’m not from Earth.” 

The words rip a little tear in him. Keith isn’t. In the violet light around them, Keith’s eyes shine and reflect the way no human’s would—the way Shiro’s never will. There was a trick to it, before Kerberos. Some way he had where with a few words and a glance he could keep Keith in his orbit, but no more. Keith is a rogue object, sliding from system to system. 

He really is that comet, and Shiro is stationary. A fixed point that will never waver.

“I guess not,” Shiro murmurs. 

Keith rises, holds eye contact for a moment before he puts the camera in his pocket. “Let’s go for a walk.” 

Shiro shrugs. It’s Keith’s choice, either way. He'd love the excuse to get some exercise. The routine of it got him through the war and now, after, it grounds him. They take off through the trees on some hidden path Keith must know by heart. The forest is bright and clean, dew hanging off the strange and twisted branches. Something about the light is wrong—too red. They cross a stream full of rocks the color of the sky. All of it is just a little alien. “We were going to do another shoot here, but it’s not like anyone has been here. No one knows it.”

Water drips from above and catches on Keith’s hair before it falls to the back of his neck and disappears under his collar. “So why here?”

Keith shrugs and pushes past a bush with leaves that curl up at his touch. “Wanted you to see it, I guess. Wanted to show you. The universe is really neat, and—”

“Neat?” Shiro laughs. 

“Yeah.” Keith stops and Shiro almost runs into him—too busy watching the way the belt hangs off Keith’s waist. Ahead of them is open space. A plain that stretches from horizon to horizon. There are cliffs and crags in the distance, across the valley ahead of them that’s full of nothing but fog. “It’s neat,” Keith says, only a bit defensive.

It’s neat—it’s breathtaking. 

“Are you advertising to me?” Shiro asks faintly. “Is this whole thing an ad pitch? I knew it.”

Turning from the view to Keith is almost as much a punch in the gut. It reflects on his face. He’s inhumanly beautiful, scars and all. Keith doesn’t reply a moment, returning his gaze with something unreadable as his eyes trace across Shiro’s face. 

“You’re so lame,” he says softly and then looks away. “No. It’s not—an advertisement. I don’t know how to say it right. The war put us through hell, but…” He chances another glance at Shiro, drawing from his metal arm up to his hair and the scar across his nose. “The war put _you_ through hell. I wanted you to take a vacation.”

The one question Shiro has never had a good answer to is why. It’s on the tip of his tongue to ask now. _Why do you care?_

But of course, he already has the answer to that one. _I love you,_ he remembers, a memory with an echo, from both sides of it—from that place beyond places, distant and desperate, and then the face-first confession, the blood in his mouth and the tears in Keith’s eyes, the chaos raining down around them. That’s the _why_ of Keith’s care, but it still doesn’t explain how it got there in the first place. What Shiro did to earn it.

“Thank you. For everything.”

Keith draws up, sucks in a breath, opens his mouth and then closes it as his gaze traces off over the horizon. “I wish—” he says and then cuts himself off. 

Shiro tips his head, almost asks, but Keith shakes his head. 

Neither of them break the silence for a time. Kosmo gets bored with it and pushes between them. Shiro rubs at his ears and Keith smiles at them both. “There’s a hot spring down there, if you want to check it out,” he offers.

He thinks of Keith, dressed down, the steam and heat and the chance to look without the constant wriggle of guilt in his gut. “I could be persuaded.”

* * *

“How did you even find hot dogs? Aren’t those banned now?”

Keith shrugs in the firelight. His hair is still a bit damp from the hot spring, which was all Shiro imagined and more—but of course the peaceful day had devolved into a water fight a few hours in and a water fight with someone who can teleport isn’t really fair. Their clothes are set out on makeshift hangars fashioned out of sticks and stuck in the ground by the fire. Kosmo is lying beside it on his back, paws in the air as he periodically rolls back and forth, drying himself or scratching his back—it’s not clear. 

For dinner, Keith revealed a smorgasbord of camp foods, most of which Shiro wasn’t aware were still available. Trail mix without the raisins, hot dogs, and all the makings for s’mores. 

Once, before Kerberos, they’d tried camping in the desert around the Garrison. Adam had called him a madman and ditched out, so it was just the two of them and all their mutual outdoors prowess. It turned out, not much on Shiro’s end. Keith set the fire while Shiro set up the tent and then they’d made their best attempt at s’mores. Evidently, it’s a fond memory for Keith. It is for Shiro, too, but limned in their total inability to figure out how not to burn a marshmallow. 

Of course, that was only after they’d figured out the marshmallow was the only part you were supposed to hold over the fire.

This round goes better. They end up using an entire box of graham crackers and then transition to marshmallow and chocolate sandwiches that melt on their fingers and leave a sticky mess everywhere.

"You've got something—" Keith motions to his own mouth, opens it a bit and then watches as Shiro wipes away the chocolate. It might be the firelight, but his eyes seem odd. Shiro can’t put his finger on it until the fire flares for a moment. His pupils are heavy and black. Keith swallows and then says too quickly, “I never really asked what things were like after I left.” 

Tedious. Trying. Less than ideal. 

“Boring.” 

Keith scoffs. “Boring? Really?” 

It was. It was bad, too, but the boredom was an accessory annoyance. It’s so hard to distinguish those memories from the ones of being stuck in the Black Lion’s consciousness, trapped on that blank plain, infinite and lifeless and undying. The clone’s memories overwrite most of it. His small frustrations with the team, his distant sense that something wasn’t right, and how he couldn’t help wonder if Keith’s absence was a piece of that. 

“Well, aside from the constant threat of death and the epic space battles. You know.” Shiro nudges his shoulder. 

Keith grins and Shiro shoots into an abridged version of all that happened—the Voltron Show and Lotor and then finds that once he’s started, he can’t stop. It comes out like a stream of consciousness, and Keith listens like it’s the most important thing anyone has ever told him, though it’s not. It’s nothing. Keith went on secret missions, found his family, got lost in space and time. 

And he thinks Monsters and Mana is interesting. By the end of Shiro’s description, Keith’s smile splits his face.

"...and I picked Paladin every time. I thought Coran was going to throw me out of an airlock." 

Keith makes a sound that's not a chuckle—too high, too fast. A giggle, and rare as can be. Shiro laughs with him, in spite of himself.

"I don't remember everything, but I think the clone was a little stubborn." Shiro says, sheepish.

At this, Keith giggles with so much passion that he seems to choke on it. "Yeah, just the clone.” When Shiro starts to object, Keith leans forward and starts counting off on his hands. "Going to Kerberos when Admiral Sanda said you couldn't. Getting me into the Garrison. Getting me to _stay_." He stops counting and stares down at his open palms. When he speaks again, its painfully soft. "You died and even that couldn't keep you down. You make me look practically reasonable."

A large part of Shiro, almost overwhelming, wants to reach out and pull him in for another hug. Or drag his fingers under Keith’s eye, cup his cheek, move the stray hair that’s fallen over his forehead, _touch_. 

It’s a barrier that can’t be crossed. A wall in his head and in his heart, insurmountable. Don’t risk this, don’t ruin this, don’t make this worse. This is fragile and he’s almost lost it a dozen times over. The scar over Keith’s cheek is dark in the half-light. A touch isn’t worth the risk. None of it is.

For bed, they spread blankets on the grass. Keith brings out some over-sized pillows and Kosmo settles between them, curling up like a dog half his size. Shiro is happy for the excuse of distance, even as he mourns it. They watch the sun set in peach hues and then the stars rise. The faint arc of a debris ring around the planet rises with them, and then the distant haze of the Milky Way—or whatever it is this far out. Not a single constellation is familiar. 

“Are you happy?” Keith asks the night.

Shiro wonders how he could ask such a silly question, and then realizes with a conviction that for the first time in a year, he is. Work makes him happy—the struggle and grind is second nature to him, part of his soul and worth and always will be, but this is a different kind of joy. This, he didn’t have to earn. 

“Yeah,” he breathes.

_You make me happy._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading!! Next and last chapter will still be up on Tuesday as planned. I just decided to go full ham on this one.
> 
> As always, you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir) and [tumblr](http://arahir.tumblr.com)!


	3. Chapter 3

“Where are we going today?” Shiro asks over breakfast. Technically, Keith has him until midnight. Shiro knows him well enough to know he’s planned almost every hour between now and then—but Keith surprises him. 

“I don’t know. Where do you want to go?”

Shiro considers a moment. “Somewhere new.”

For a moment, Keith seems to mull it over, and then he grins. “Let’s grab lunch.” 

“We’re eating breakfast.” 

Keith shrugs. “Yeah, but by the time we get there, it’ll be lunch.”

“Is this all a convoluted plan to get me to eat more?”

Keith’s gaze rakes up his torso where his borrowed tank top clings to his skin. Shiro almost feels self-conscious at the look, but it’s Keith, not some stranger in a bar, and the look isn’t disapproving. It’s warm. Maybe warmer than it should be. “Something like that,” Keith murmurs.

The trip takes two hours. It’s not really lunch when they get there but some undefined midday time. Brunch, Shiro thinks, and then wonders if Keith is someone who knows what that is now. They leave Kosmo with the ship as guard while they’re out, and then Keith shows him around the city as they head toward the diner Keith promised him was worth crossing half the galaxy for. He slides through the crowds like it’s nothing, though he sends a vicious glare to anyone who gets too close to Shiro. They manage to gather a few stares, but nothing too mortifying. 

_Amon 5. Frontiering planet turned intergalactic hot spot. A city renowned for its cultural diversity, food scene, and—_

Shiro puts his phone down. "How do you know about some small-time diner in a city no one has heard of?" Shiro asks as Keith directs them down alleys and across a bridge, down another set of stairs. 

Keith scoffs. "Everyone has heard of Amon."

"No, they haven't. It sounds like the name of a demon."

"Well, I would have taken you all, but…"

"You did a commercial here?" 

Keith closes off. "Not—not a commercial. Not exactly."

That's suspicious, even for Keith, who can't lie to save his life. Shiro lets it slide when they round the corner and see a tiny building nestled against the ballast wall that lines the point where the city touches the sea. There’s smoke coming out of the chimney and a few people milling about inside. They step in and the smell hits Shiro like atmospheric reentry—like something he’d been missing without knowing it. Screens on the wall play what might be sports, though not ones Shiro has ever heard of, but otherwise the place feels homey and classic. 

Keith directs him to a booth seat and takes the spot across from him, smiling lightly. One or two people glance his way, but he ignores them. 

It hasn’t felt like a date until that moment. Sitting, picking up a menu, aware in the back of his mind that the leather jacket he picked out of the closet in his room that morning is snug over his shoulders—the kind of preening concern he had back when he first started dating, but expanded. Now he's aware of every shift Keith makes, of his own nerves.

"I think their fries are good, but it's been a while," Keith mutters. 

Shiro shakes himself. The food is domestic—cheeseburgers and something that looks like it was inspired by BLTs, but the fine print shows the burger can be made of anything. Shiro thinks of the fruits on Eridani and feels a shudder crawl up his spine. 

But after food goo, almost anything is good. 

A waiter with six arms and a look that chases between Shiro and Keith a few times before he remembers to speak takes their orders. Shiro tries to read what the expression on his face is, but it’s hard with the four eyes and pincer mouth.

They’re two buddies getting burgers at a space restaurant. It’s really not weird, he tells himself, over and over. Keith pushes most of his fries over without needing to be asked when their food arrives, but Shiro still steals a few of the ones that are left, for old time’s sake. Sometimes back at the Garrison, they would find time to go out to a local greasy spoon on the weekends and grab a bite. Keith always ordered something with fries and Shiro always ended up with more than his share.

“You’re an idiot,” Keith laughs the third time Shiro grabs one off the pile Keith reserved for himself. “I don’t care if you take them.”

But the point is that. Just that. Keith would give him anything if he asked. The venn diagram of what Shiro wants from him and what Keith wants to give is typically a circle. A part of him always wants to test that boundary. 

He remembers the clone trying everything he could to get Keith to break from his faith. Every nasty word, every cruel insistence. Nothing worked. It should be a terror, to know someone cares about him that much, but it isn’t. 

Shiro steals another fry as Keith shoots into a small discussion of how horrible the Blades rations were and Shiro nods in time with every beat. Keith is animated. Maybe the acting has added something to him—maybe he was always this, but didn’t know how to communicate it. Shiro gets lost watching him, not really drawing in the words until Keith’s face goes very still. His gaze falls on something behind Shiro and Shiro turns. 

It’s a television. 

Keith is on it. This is a predictable and regular situation for Shiro. He almost shrugs and goes back to eating to spare himself having to expose his obsession to Keith in this way, but then he realizes it’s not a clip he recognizes. The commercials are all the same vein of soft-touched and highly produced. This isn’t. This looks, at first blush, like a sitcom. The camera view is from inside a jeep. Keith is leaning in the window, talking. 

Shiro catches the waiter as he’s walking by. “Can you turn that up?” he says, motioning to the television. Keith makes a _no, god, please, no,_ motion to the waiter, who looks between them before making what might be a shrug. “Sure.”

“Shiro—it’s really nothing—” 

The waiter moves off and after a moment the volume rises. The soundtrack is full action music, but _adventurous._ “...take you to see some critters you might never have heard of.” The Keith on camera motions to the imaginary audience in a _come on, let’s go_ gesture and steps inside the jeep. 

_Critters._

Shiro hears himself say, “Oh, Keith.”

Keith lays his head down on the table. 

What it is takes a moment to fully suss out, but Shiro is fast on the uptake. It’s a nature show and Keith is the personality showing all the wonders of the forest. A quick montage runs after the intro, a series of images of wild animals and Keith doing nature activities like standing on a cliff, bounding through the brush, gazing off into the noble distance as a jaunty song with flutes and strange percussion instruments plays in the background. Shiro chances a glance at Keith and grins when he sees how red Keith’s face is. 

“Why are you embarrassed?”

“I’m not,” Keith moans, and buries his face in his hands. 

* * *

The harbor glitters. Boats with sails like birds’ wings float in the distance. As they watch, a sleek little aircraft comes in for a landing and skates across the water. It reminds him of a place he’s been, but he can’t place it. Earth but not. Maybe that’s why Keith likes it. In the distance, clouds are stacked like mountains over the water, coming on fast. It’s going to be a storm—they won’t be able to take off in it, so there’s no point in trying to get out before then. It’ll be night soon, anyway.

“It’s always sunset with us,” Keith muses. 

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Shiro’s grin hasn’t left his face since the diner. Every time he remembers the show—which he forced Keith to sit through, the entire half hour fandango—his smile comes back full force. Once or twice he has to stifle a laugh. The picture of Keith in khaki pants and matching hat with the _Keith’s Critters_ logo sprayed off center across his t-shirt, crouched low over a bug-eyed lizard in some distant forest, explaining the intricacies of its defensive mechanisms only to leap away at the moment its head flared with spikes… It’s too good. There have to be more episodes. Shiro is going to download them all and update his folder of shame.

Keith half shrugs. Their hands are so close on the dock that Keith’s fingers brush his when he shifts. “It’s not.”

It’s not, but there’s a hesitation in Keith’s voice. A distance. The delight drains out of Shiro, leaving him hollow and wanting for something he can’t put his finger on—except, perhaps, that he can and if he were braver he could move his hand that extra inch and let it be something. 

He’s not.

Shiro stands and dusts himself off, starts to offer to help Keith up before he wonders why that’s easier than bridging an inch gap at any other time. Keith takes his hand and it feels like nothing, like every day, like the thousand times they’ve touched. They start back toward the ship as night begins cresting over the city, helped along by the storm. It turns the streets the strangest shade of dark. It almost looks artificial. 

Soon, it begins to rain, so fine it feels like mist. 

Neither of them make for cover. “No matter how long it’s been, I still miss the rain,” Keith says, staring up at the sky so the last of the light catches his eyes. Shiro follows his gaze. It was part of the reason he couldn’t leave again after he got back. Rain, wind, heat—the unpredictability of it reminded him where he was, and where he wasn’t. 

“Why did you leave?” Shiro asks. It’s the one question that’s been tugging at his heart, because he did leave. He hopes Keith doesn’t take it as an attack. 

He doesn’t. His steps slow and he regards the twilit street ahead of them like he’s seeing something else. “I needed time to find my place.”

Your place was with us. Your place was with me. Instead, Shiro asks, “Did you?”

“I guess.”

He left for an _I guess_. That feels worse, and Shiro realizes the persistent tear through the center of him when he talks to Keith now is growing moment by moment against his will. “We missed you.”

“Did you?” Keith throws back at him. 

The crowds on the street are growing. It’s a night-life city and the neon signs that line it are reflected on the wet concrete. "...What's that supposed to mean?" Shiro's tone is cold. He can't control it; the implication is lodged in his throat. 

There isn't a universe where he wouldn't miss Keith like he misses his right hand, but more. The hand is an acceptable loss.

At his tone, Keith reels back, like he's just realized what he said and to who. "Nothing. I didn't—"

"Nothing?" 

"Yeah, nothing. I just—I was never part of the team. You know that."

No, he did not. Shiro stops in the middle of the street, ignoring the passing of the crowd. Keith stops with him, looking like he would prefer to drag Shiro along behind him more than have this conversation. "You lead the team." 

"For a while, I guess. But it's not like we were all friends." Shiro opens his mouth to protest, but Keith cuts him off. "I'm just saying what we all know. It was really bad while you were—" he stumbles over his words, " _—gone_ and then after you got back… it didn't feel the same.”

 _I wasn’t the same,_ he wants to argue, desperately. Nothing had made sense. “You pushed us away."

"You pushed first. I told you I didn't want to pilot Black."

"Keith, you can't run from what you are. From _who_ you are." People are watching now and the rain is starting to come down in earnest. Keith is worth standing in the rain to watch. Shiro would. He's magnificent and he left them all behind. "I knew you could be great. Greater than me. That's why I pushed you—"

 _You pushed first._ That’s what Keith said. He was right, but for the wrong reasons.

"I didn't want to be better than you." He says it so clearly that it echoes down the street. 

The people that are watching them are watching now with a pitying attention, watching Keith with stars in their eyes, watching the Black Paladin fight with a stranger in the rain, Shiro thinks. "You are better than me."

Keith’s eyes flash—actually flash. There’s yellow in them suddenly. "No. No, I'm not.” He waves to the people around them. “They're not looking at me. They're looking at you. Shiro, I'm not the one that someone paid a hundred thousand for a date with. I only—" He cuts off on a sound of pure frustration, but it rings like pain and Shiro almost reaches out to him before he remembers that’s off the table. _Don't touch, don't fall into this any deeper._

Too late. Keith's eye catches the aborted movement and his brow cinches with some emotion Shiro can't identify as Keith turns his gaze to the wet asphalt. "I only wanted to stand next to you."

In the next breath, he's gone. Shiro has a glimpse of red disappearing between the figures that have stopped to watch. He tries to follow, but Keith is inhumanly fast and the night is dark. He slips away between breaths.

Shiro doesn’t go after him. He wouldn't know what to do with Keith if he caught him.

* * *

The spaceport is the biggest building on the harborside of the city, and it’s lit up like a Voltron Coalition event. Shiro winds his way toward it through the streets, the wet sound of his steps the only evidence he’s walking, because he can’t feel the ground anymore. Above him on a wall ahead is one of the coalition’s standard posters. It’s a painting of him. It’s Shiro, staring off into the distance, medals pinned to his uniform. They’re a dime a dozen; one on every street corner. His eyes are so used to skipping over it, he forgets they exist at all. It’s imposing, though. Shiro feels his back straighten to match the pose in the photo. 

Keith is right. This is what people see him as, and they see him everywhere. He’s at least the most well-known face in the universe aside from Keith himself now—but it never felt like a victory, like something to be sought or emulated. 

_I only wanted to stand next to you._

But he has, for years. From the start. It doesn't make sense. Keith is the only person in the universe that could stand next to him. He must know that.

The ship is dark when he gets back, but the hatch is still down. It’s still _there,_ which is something, though he never let himself entertain the thought that Keith would be mad enough to leave him there. He never let himself think about Keith being gone, either. 

He's in luck. Keith is seated at the counter in the dark, dripping water. He brought the storm in with him.

Shiro's steps on the corrugated metal floor echo. Keith doesn't move with the sound. He exists in that moment in a separate universe, a perfect stillness that can't be passed through, as if the wall Shiro has put between them has manifested at last. Shiro has all the time in the universe to examine him. 

The paleness of his face, the hard line of his jaw that will never be rugged even as it becomes more defined, the fall of his hair around his face, more shadow than substance. His eyes are red as if he's been crying—frustration does it to him faster than anything else and Shiro realizes he's the source. It’s how it goes with them. He lets Keith skip ahead of him, grow and blossom, rise and rise until he's beyond sight, and then tells himself it was always meant to be. 

But he’s been looking at only half of the issue. The same is true for Keith, he realizes with an intake of breath. In Keith’s mind, Shiro the thing running ahead. The difference is that Keith is in it for the chase.

Their fight is slipping away from him now. The why and how of it, all the reasons for distance. "I'm sorry," Shiro says anyway, and Keith draws in a shaking breath. 

"For what?" Keith asks, sounding weary and sounding mad.

"For not doing this sooner." They consider him cautious. Everyone does. 

They forget he's the one that taught Keith how to jump off a cliff. 

He steps closer and reaches out, draws his fingertips over Keith's cheek and settles there, hardly breathing. Keith's eyes widen, but he doesn't move away. Even though Shiro is present for every moment from there until their lips touch, it still surprises him. He surprises himself. Keith's mouth is softer than he imagined. In the hard-edged world of his imaginings, Keith's lips were hard and unyielding, maybe a little chapped. 

No. In reality, his mouth is as giving as the rest of him. As giving as he always is for Shiro. It clicks in his mind as Keith opens under him, draws a breath of surprise through his nose that cools Shiro's cheek. He makes a sound that travels up his throat and under Shiro's hand, like surprise, like desperation.

Shiro licks into his mouth without meaning to, trying to prolong it, letting everything fall away into the din of the rain still pouring down outside. He tastes clean. Shiro has had other first kisses. Other last kisses. This is different. This is a revelation, some pain he'd gotten so used to he'd forgotten it entirely easing at last. It will have to end, but that feels like someone else's problem.

Keith makes another sound, louder, and then there's a hand around Shiro's arm and another on his hip. Just as Shiro thinks: _This is it. I've gone too far._ Keith pulls him in, hard. The kiss changes; Keith bites at his bottom lip, tilts his head, deepens it clumsily. Shiro realizes he's losing his footing and stumbles back as Keith's strength pushes him to the counter of the ship's kitchenette.

Their teeth click together. It jars them both out of the kiss.

"Do you mean it?" Keith asks, the way a child might ask to keep a stray dog. Shiro brushes the hair from Keith's eyes and wonders if he's the thing Keith brought home, too. 

"We should talk about this." Shiro hates himself for saying it. He hates himself so much he angles his head down and takes another kiss instead, close-mouthed. 

Keith hesitates, like he might pull away and make a talk out of it, but then he gives. They stay right there for what might be minutes, time slowing down around them. He never enjoyed making out. Kissing was perfunctory, secondary to anything else, sometimes embarrassing. He gets it now as Keith's hands feel out his edges, breath hot between them, mouth wet. It is embarrassing. It's embarrassing how much he wants it. 

He lets his metal hand slip to Keith's hip. His t-shirts were always too tight. This one exposes a wide band of skin—bone, muscle, the ribbing of a scar. Shiro surprises himself when he feels the fingers dip beneath the waistband of Keith's pants. The arm isn't connected to his body by bone and sinew; it works off thought and intent and sometimes he doesn't know himself as well as he thinks he does.

Keith shivers. He draws away, but their lips still brush when he rasps, "I haven't done this. Any of this."

It doesn't sound like _stop_. More an offer. An admission.

Shiro's blanks a moment as a thousand little jealousies and assumptions he could never admit to himself write over in his mind. "Really?"

He doesn't mean to sound shocked. Keith tenses. His jaw sets in defiance. "But I can _learn—_ "

"Keith." Shiro would laugh but it would be inappropriate. Delight is inappropriate. He remembers the clone's rabid joy at the thought that Keith had come for him, was going to fight with him, die with him, never leave. The only emotion it could feel past the programming. It was just the clone, he told himself later. As if they were separate people.

As if.

Shiro closes his grip on Keith's hip more tightly, rubs his thumb in a circle below Keith's waistband, dipping further. Keith shivers again. He's sensitive. 

"That's not a problem." 

He has a sudden vision of hiking Keith up on the counter, sinking to his knees. Of pushing him down on the table, on his back. Of himself bowed over Keith's arching back, hands on hands on the dark metal floor, sweat slick between them.

Keith shifts against his hand. "Really? You don't care?"

"Oh, I care." Shiro releases him and pushes him away toward the door, leading from behind with a hand on Keith's shoulder, marching him toward the door of one of the bedrooms. Keith's, he realizes peripherally. It's bare, but there are stars on the ceiling, glowing in the dark. The detail is sweet. Almost childish. He wonders if Keith had them on the ceiling of his childhood bedroom, before the fire, or if maybe Keith always wanted them. Shiro is there only one that's ever going to see this side of him. It feels a little sacred.

He stops Keith in front of the wide bed and pulls the hair hanging over his neck to one side to brush a kiss to his nape. He pulls the collar of the t-shirt down and repeats it over the top of his spine, each one making a soft sound.

Keith sighs. He's shaking now, a fine tremble that Shiro only notices as he presses himself to Keith's back and wraps his arms around Keith's waist. The only light in the room emanates from his arm; it's not enough to see by. "Are you scared?" he asks. It feels like someone else's voice, someone else's curiosity.

Keith shudders again, shakes his head. "Not of you." He takes a breath. "I just really don't want to mess this up," he admits. He turns his head enough that Shiro can make out the flash of his eyes, the shape of his expression, which is self-deprecating. Honest. 

Shiro kisses the edge of it and thinks: _I'm going to make this perfect. I'm going to make you cry._

* * *

That kiss bleeds into another, and another. Shiro misses the part where their shirts come off, Keith's fingers deft, nimble, and seeking. They stray over his pecs, around the seam of his shoulder where metal meets skin, and down his spine, to the top of Shiro's borrowed jeans. To the top of the jeans Keith bought for him, he realizes, sized to fit like a glove.

"Can we—" Keith mumbles into his shoulder where he's been working on a mark, tugging at Shiro's clothes.

They part to pull each other's shirts off. Keith's boots end up across the room. His pants follow. He's not wearing anything underneath. 

By the light of his arm, Shiro can make out Keith's figure seated on the bed before him. His eyes flash in the dark, hair falling around his shoulders, thin muscle filling out his long frame. What Shiro can make out of his expression isn't self-conscious. It's daring. Alluring without meaning to be. He remembers the late nights spent staring down his datapad's screen and Keith's simulated image there, the shame of it. Nothing about this is shameful. Every other rendition is sacrilege.

Shiro kneels over him, knee between his open thighs. Keith leans up to him. The space that separates them is a thread ready to snap. It will, but he's still warring with himself on how to play this. Except it's not play, not at all, and though he's fairly sure there's no such thing as too fast in Keith's mind, so far they've been glacial. 

And this is Keith's first time.

Shiro holds his gaze and lets his metal hand draw up Keith's leg and under his thigh, watching for the moment Keith's throat jumps. It does, and he stills.

"Are you sure this is what you want?"

Keith's black-pitch gaze widens and Shiro is privileged with a genuine, certified look of total disbelief, as if Keith is sixteen again and just stepped out of the simulator to hear some instructor comment on his flying. He wasn't aware Keith could still manage a look like that. It's refreshing. Shiro rolls his eyes so Keith doesn't have to, not sure if Keith can see them in the dark and presses his knee up until Keith's expression bleeds away in a gasp. 

He follows it with a press of his lips to the column of Keith's throat, fists his human hand through Keith's hair to tug his head back and bite his way to the juncture of his shoulder.

The texture of his skin changes. A scar. Shiro saw him bleed for that one—saw all his worst scars, though there are more he doesn't know now. Regret stirs and banks as shifts and breathes and shivers. Keith is a livewire and he'll never be out of his element in the bedroom again, judging by the way he casually pops the button on the pants Shiro forgot to divest and starts doing it for him.

Still, the hand against in his pants is unexpected. He feels Keith's smile. "You're—"

"Yeah, I'm aware." He's been half hard since they walked into the room. Before. It's the first time since he was a teen that it's been so easy and it would be embarrassing if he still had any shame left. 

Keith pushes him back and drops off the edge of the bed, to his bare knees on the metal. Shiro's mind lags behind until he feels breath, a mouth—

"I dreamed about this." Keith whispers it against him.

Shiro would assume he was dreaming, too, but his were never this good. "You dreamed about sucking my dick? Really?" It's blatant disbelief, but Keith laughs.

"Shiro—you have no idea how long. It’s always been you." Lips close over him, unpracticed. Keith's tongue follows, equally clumsy, and perfect. It's like he's hungry for it, or maybe he watched the same bad porn Shiro did. Shiro should be in his place—wants it as much, can almost taste it on his tongue, but he cups Keith's head in both hands and thrusts forward in little motions. 

Keith's moan is muffled. He grips around Shiro to moderate the pace and with his free hand reaches between his own legs. Shiro only sees because he's laser focused on every movement Keith is making, the way every shudder and sound translates over in pure perfection. "Don't touch yourself," he hears himself say with a tone he doesn't recognize. 

Without hesitating, Keith pulls his hand away and grips the floor instead. Shiro's blood soars. 

He pushes Keith more, little by little, until he can feel Keith swallow around him reflexively and he has to make sure the grip he has on Keith's hair and jaw isn't breaking. That’s new. Sex has always been a diversion. Not this all-encompassing thing. He doesn't want to come yet he realizes.

"Stop."

Again, Keith's response is immediate. He pulls off. His lips are wet and so red in the half-light they're almost black against the pale of his skin. 

"Get on the bed."

Keith scrambles up on it with comical speed as Shiro tries to take off his pants the rest of the way with his blood pounding incessantly in his ears. It lets some of the tension bleed out of him, and the rest goes when he turns and sees Keith's smile before he smothers it. He doesn't bother to hide the way his eyes rove over Shiro's body. With one night stands it took a moment and more than a few awkward questions. The arm, the scars, the hair. Or, most of the time, they already knew—or thought they did. Keith _knows_. Better than anyone in the galaxy aside from Shiro himself, and maybe better than that.

It makes him smile outright—a look Keith returns in full. Shiro climbs on the bed over him and kisses him to taste it. Keith pulls away a moment later. “I have—stuff.” He jerks his head toward the cabinets on the wall behind the bed Shiro’s mind doesn’t process the words with the speed it should, but the upcast of Keith’s gaze, as if the ceiling is suddenly and indescribably fascinating helps him connect the dots. 

“For—”

Keith nods and scrunches his nose. 

“But you said you hadn’t—done anything.” Shiro hates the sound of his voice, hates the way the question trips out before he can stop it. Keith snorts and pushes at him so he can clamber off the bed.

“I haven’t with anyone else. But I told you. I’ve wanted this for—a long time,” Keith says as he opens one of the cabinets. Everything in a ship needs to be tied down and this, too, it seems. Shiro almost misses the bottle Keith throws at him but manages a fumble of a catch and then is left staring at the hard evidence that Keith wasn’t flattering him. Shiro knew he wasn’t. He knew, and still, holding the proof behind the image of Keith lying alone in bed, sweating and writhing is another thing entirely.

The first touch must surprise Keith. He gasps and inches back on the bed. It's the hand, Shiro thinks. He's used the prosthetic without thinking about it; the thing is second nature to him now and the way it feels is almost realer than real. He wanted that for this. 

"No, no, wait," Keith says in a rush, grabbing the hand as Shiro starts to pull away. "It's not that. It just. I feels different when it’s actually you.” 

Shiro can feel the beating of his heart like a drum, can hear it in his ears. “Good,” he murmurs and tucks away Keith’s gasp of shock against his lips as he goes back to his task. Breathy sounds brush against his cheek. Sweat makes the grip he has on Keith’s leg slip. Part of him wants to ask _Is this okay? Is this what you want?_ every few seconds, but the part of him that quashes that is stronger by far. 

He does ask once, when he reaches the place in Keith that makes him shudder, and grip at Shiro’s shoulders, either trying to move away from the touch or grind down on it. “Are you sure—” he barely breathes before Keith kisses him open-mouthed and shudders again. He can still taste himself in Keith’s mouth. The heat between his legs still heavy and hard. In years, it hasn't been like this. No. Never. He's never wanted it like this.

He works the spot inside Keith that makes him twitch and gasp until he figures out a rhythm that keeps Keith on edge. Shiro's words must have meant something to him; he hasn't made a motion to touch himself, though he looks so keyed up it must be painful. 

Shiro almost does it for him, but that part of him is quiet now to the greater part that wants very much to see the next level of the expression Keith is making at that moment: eyes black, skin starting to sheen with sweat, biting his lip so hard it looks bloody. 

"You're allowed to make noise. No one's going to hear." No one but him. "Keith."

That extra syllable is what it takes, the barest hint of authority in it. Keith's mouth opens just as Shiro moves against that spot with more intent than before. He cries out. 

None of the videos could get that right. None of the imitations. Not even Shiro's own imagination, it turns out. He needn't have bothered trying. This is a sound he's heard before. It almost sounds like pain. Like some involuntary product of a fight. 

Another cry follows it, high and cracking. 

Shiro pulls out of him and pulls Keith onto his lap by the hips, relishing the way Keith tenses and then loosens into the new position, lets his legs fall open and drape around Shiro's hips. The slow press in steals his breath. Keith makes a low sound, almost a growl, and god, he's tight. A bare inch in Shiro pauses, gathers his senses and his will not to blow off like he's a teen again. 

"More," Keith urges after no time at all. Shiro reassess his earlier thought that this would be the last night he had Keith off his game. Not even one night. 

A heel digs low into spine.

"You know, patience—"

"Don't. Don't you da— _ah_ —"

Shiro pushes in as deep as he can get in this position and revels in the tightening of the grip Keith has on the sheets. The legs around his waist tighten, too. The only thing keeping him tethered is how much he wants to make it good for Keith. He starts moving, barely more than rocking into Keith until that motion becomes nothing more than frustration that has Keith pulling him down so he can bite at Shiro’s throat and then starts _moving_. 

Each thrust pushes Keith up on the bed, until he has to brace one hand on the wall that serves as a headboard. All of him looks strained and strung out, muscle tense and gleaming in the dark. Shiro bows over him to kiss the arch of his neck and then noses at the line of his hair where it meets the pillow in a mess of black against white. He can feel Keith’s hardness against his abs, that press the only friction he’s got. It’s still too soon for more.

Keith’s sounds are getting more desperate. Less voluntary.

Shiro loses himself in the heavy sound of their bodies meeting in the quiet, the sweet slide. He changes the angle just to hear Keith’s voice change as he drives into the spot he knows will get him what he wants. 

“Shiro— _Shiro_ —”

There. The crack in his voice. The edge of his eyes are bright and heavy. Keith blinks and the wetness paints the skin around his eyes reflective. Pupils blown, mouth open, overwhelmed and right on the edge of too much but not over. This is how Shiro wants him. This is what he deserves. 

In a breath and a show of strength, Shiro repositions them both, pulling Keith up so that he’s resting in Shiro’s lap and has to look down into Shiro’s eyes. Keith makes a little sound of surprise, almost alarm. It doesn’t give Shiro the leverage he wants, but it’s worth it. There’s nothing to hide in this position. “Can you move?” He wants to make it an order, but Keith is already so far gone. 

Keith manages the smallest nod and then presses his forehead to the crook of Shiro’s neck as he balances on his knees and rises and falls. It’s hardly enough friction. Shiro meets him halfway, the motion forcing a ragged moan out of Keith. 

He makes Keith ride him there for an interminable amount of time, until Keith’s thighs are shaking, and then his arms with the effort of steadying himself on Shiro’s larger form. “Please,” Keith starts begging, arching himself into Shiro for some form of friction.

"Ready?" Shiro asks. 

Keith is too far gone to reply. Shiro wraps his fist around Keith and is treated to another cry as Keith clenches around him, his whole body going tight as he comes. Shiro isn't ready for the brutality of the kiss. Tooth on tooth, and Keith's are sharp now. It draws blood. 

Shiro holds him through it, rocking into him because he can't get distance enough to do more. It's enough. Keith clenches around him, rhythmically, and Shiro whites out before he knows he’s going to. Keith slumps on him and Shiro lets him fall back onto the bed so he can ride it out, pushing into Keith’s lax form until the oversensitivity forces him to stop. 

When he pulls out, he doesn’t make it far. Keith’s arms and legs come up around him in a grasp to hold him there. Shiro pushes his face into Keith’s chest as Keith’s fingers play with his hair absently and tries to remember why this ever seemed difficult.

* * *

"Time's up." Keith's voice is muffled as he sets the phone back on the bed and scrubs a hand through his hair. "You're a free man."

Shiro can't muster the strength to do more than mumble a sound of agreement. The bed shifts. He rolls and Keith is leaned over him, looking at his shoulder, illuminated by the artificial light. With an indecipherable look he pulls away. After a moment, the shower turns on and the pit of Shiro's stomach tugs with unease. All of him wants to follow Keith in and help him clean up, but it’s not made for two people, so he stays for lack of anything better to do and tries not to imagine fingering Keith open under the spray. It's hard to tell if it's morning or something else. His own clock is ruined, time itself feels upturned and scattered in between the sheets that are still warm. Shiro pushes his face back into the pillow and breathes in what must be the scent of whatever soap Keith uses. By the time the shower turns off, he's half asleep again. 

"We can eat breakfast on the way back," Keith says as he steps out, toweling his hair dry. 

_On the way back to where?_ Shiro almost asks, but then reality comes crashing down again. That’s right. His ship. Which he left parked around some backwater planet. His crew's loyalty is unshakable, it's not worth pushing it. He has to go back. 

This was always the problem. Their lives are too separate now. Whatever Keith has planned after this, it probably doesn't involve being chained to Earth bureaucracy for the sole benefit of Shiro's company. They'll make time. They'll make this work. Long distance isn't so long when hyper drives are involved. 

The promise feels hollow in his own mind, so he doesn't voice it. Not when they sit beside each other in the cockpit, making small talk as Keith navigates him back. Not when Keith touches down inside the Atlas's open hangar doors. Not when Shiro leaves hits borrowed clothes folded on Keith's still unmade bed. Not when the doors open and he doesn't have one excuse left not to step out even though his whole heart feels like it's been left on the bed beside the clothes. 

He pats Kosmo goodbye first. The wolf spent the night in the small cargo area on the ship. Shiro resolves to bring him a treat for his discretion next time they see each other.

Keith is too hard to look at, but Shiro makes himself. He can't not. Like the poster on the back of his door, his gaze is pulled to Keith’s face like he has his own gravity. In the hard light of the hangar, he doesn't look ethereal. He looks worked over, and a little tired. His eyes are ringed and his hair is more fly-away than usual. His lips are red and swollen. 

He's still standing on the ramp, so Shiro has to reach up to draw him into a kiss. Keith returns it with both hands in Shiro's hair, gripping tight enough to pull. "I—" he starts when they pull apart, tone rough before he stutters on the next word and pauses. He pulls away. "I'll see you soon,” he says quietly.

Shiro nods. "Any time, any place."

Keith's smile is tight. He's the first to turn away. Shiro is left staring at his back as the ramp rises and obscures him inch by inch, and then he's out of sight. In record time, the ship lifts off and shoots off into space, smaller and smaller until it's a glint indistinguishable from the million other stars outside.

For a brief moment, panic seizes Shiro. _He's gone, he's gone,_ his heart beats. The feeling follows him back into the main doors, down the hallway to his quarters. He registers salutes and stuttered greetings only at the edge of his mind. He should make an announcement, start procedures to get them as far away from this planet as possible. He wants to run. 

When he closes his eyes, he’s back on Keith’s ship, encompassed in Keith’s grip with the smell of his shampoo mingling with the smell of their shared sweat and breath. Nothing about that specific moment is special. There’s no reason it should be so good a memory, but it’s suddenly in his top three. He wonders how it is that Keith features in all of them and then wonders if he’s in any of Keith’s and if last night was one of them. If it wasn’t, he deserves a second chance. Maybe a third.

Maybe in twenty years, if he tries hard enough, all of Keith’s best memories will be about him.

That revelation comes as he steps onto the bridge. That. It’s so simple and so easy. It isn’t _save the universe_ or _rebuild Earth_ or _figure out how to fall out of love with my best friend._

It floors him. He actually stops, frozen to the floor, right there in the entrance. Being with Keith is the endgame. Being happy, together. It can’t be that hard. His heart surges and he realizes he’s being stared at by roughly the entire command crew of the ship: even Iverson is there. They must have called him in when they realized Shiro was AWOL. That’s embarrassing, and a problem for a different time. 

"I need to borrow a ship,” he hears himself announce with confidence of unknown origin.

Griffin is closest. He shares a desperate look with the blond lieutenant behind him. "Sir, but you just got back. And we've been here for _weeks_.”

Later, he will wonder what two synapses connected in his mind to make madness, but in that moment what he feels isn’t guilt but a personal and selfish victory. He doesn’t need to borrow a ship. He _has_ a ship. “Right. You’re right. Are operations wrapped up on the ground?”

Griffin almost falls over himself nodding. The lieutenant and he share another look, this one excited. “We can have everyone on board in an hour.”

* * *

It takes two. Someone has gone MIA planetside for reasons Shiro can’t know but can't blame the man for, given what he’s about to put the ship through. 

The thing everyone forgets is that while the Atlas was built by the Galaxy Garrison, it's his ship to command. No one else can, and no one outranks him now to tell him where to go and when. As he sets his hands on the control panel and feels the ship roar to life with a static burn at the tips of his fingers, he can see the reprimand: _Gross misuse of Garrison assets for personal gain._ In his mind, he picks up the memo and tears it up.

Only one person in the universe could tell Shiro what to do now and have it mean something. But Keith wouldn't. That's not how love works. 

"Orders, Admiral?" someone asks.

Shiro stretches and his senses stretch with him, from one end of the ship to the other. He can feel the engines roar to life in time with his heartbeat. "No," he says simply. "Just hold on."

* * *

Shore leave on Amon 5 is the best he has to offer his crew in exchange for what he’s put them through. What he’s still going to put them through. It certainly has nothing to do with what he hopes is there waiting for him. After the perfunctory meet and greet with the planet’s governess and welcomes all around, _we’re so pleased with your visit, Sir though it is unexpected,_ Shiro puts Iverson in charge of formalities and hightails it for the public skyharbor. His instincts are right. Keith's ship is parked back in the bay, almost where it was before, but not quite. It takes only a cursory scan to pick out the red in with the rest.

The ship may be there, but Keith isn’t. Neither is Kosmo. He’d entertained a vision of Kosmo teleporting him to Keith with a little cajoling and a sizable portion of the Atlas’s bacon rations as promised collateral. No such luck.

Waiting for Keith is the smartest option. This is the one place Keith has to come back to. Shiro tries his phone—for the fifth time, in desperation—but it’s still out of service, which means Keith has it turned off. 

Waiting is the smartest option, but it’s also the slowest, and that’s suddenly unacceptable. 

In desperation, he tries the diner, piecing together the way there from his scattered memories. It’s enough. He finds the little shop and pushes inside to scan for a red jacket, black hair, a giant wolf—anything. It’s busier than it was when Keith and he went, but Keith is easy to pick out in a crowd and he’s nowhere in sight. 

Shiro is about to walk out when a voice stops him with a quiet, “Hey.”

It’s too high to be Keith’s voice. Shiro turns and finds the waiter. The one with too many eyes to keep track of. He beckons Shiro over with an impatient gesture. At least—Shiro thinks it’s impatience. It’s hard to tell with the extra arms. “Looking for your friend?” 

Shiro nods over-eager and glances around again, as if maybe they’re keeping Keith under the counter and he didn’t look hard enough, but the waiter shakes his head and rolls at least two eyes. “He’s not here. Came in with a dog and ordered fries to go. Said he was going to the dock.”

For a mad moment, Shiro considers kissing him, but instead he empties his pockets on the counter—$2.50 in change, not exactly life changing but the best he can manage—and nods and gives thanks and bows as he backs toward the door, and then turns and heads toward the sea. The docks are a walk, but that’s fine. He can run. 

If the diner was busy, the docks are somehow busier. 

There are people fishing, boats going in and out, cargo being unloaded off water-landers. He wastes an hour searching the area, until he pulls out his datapad in desperation and finds the least lewd and most genuine picture of Keith he has saved and starts showing it around. It gets him a few nods, a few exclamations of recognition, but no one has seen him outside of a television screen. He pulls up a picture of Kosmo next, but that’s equally fruitless.

By chance, he finds the dock Keith brought him to before. It’s one of the quieter piers, on the edge of the harbor, with enough space to catch the light as the sun sets bloody in the distance. Shiro makes himself stop there and breathe. If it were a movie, he could sit there and eventually Keith would appear behind him, say his name in quiet tones in time for Shiro to turn and kiss him in the sunset light. It would be that easy. 

But nothing is. He drags himself away once the last of the light disappears behind the water and a chill starts to kick up in the breeze. 

Waiting by the ship was the best option. More fool he. The trudge back feels like a walk of shame. Unlike before, there’s no rain to dampen the night-life, and it spills out of restaurants and bars and clubs, into the streets. Slogging through is like pushing against a tide and Shiro just wants to _get there_. 

He gets so lost in the crowd that he almost misses the familiar head of dark hair as it steps by him. 

It doesn’t miss him. 

Keith turns to look at him, eyes wide with shock before he’s pulled away by the crowd. Shiro registers this in an instant, and then plants his feet on the ground, willing himself to stone against the pull. Keith does the same, and soon people are moving past them like a stream around rock. 

“What are you doing here?” Keith asks, words almost obscured by the din. The crowd begins to part, leaving them a courtesy space of a few feet.

 _What do you think?_ Shiro wants to ask, but sarcasm isn’t where he wants to go with this. Shiro thinks of a dozen answers and discards them all. _I want to be with you_ is honest but not enough. _I don’t want to be alone anymore_ is too desperate. _Last night was the best night of my life and I want every night after to be that good_ is too much. Someone tries to step between them and Shiro pushes them away with prejudice. The woman starts to snap at him, but Shiro snaps back: “I’m trying to talk to my friend.” 

He doesn’t register the recognition in her eyes as she looks between them. He only has eyes for Keith, who’s still waiting for an answer but won’t wait forever. 

It can’t be that hard. The perfect words are right there, right beyond his reach. The crowd around them seems to quiet as he closes his eyes, breathes. When he opens them again all he can see is the violet of Keith’s as they catch the neon all around them, the play of that light on his hair, the scar on his cheek edged in red.

“I love you,” Shiro says. 

Keith’s eyes go impossibly wider and dart side to side, as if trying to calculate the likelihood that this is real. Shiro risks a step forward. "You said I should do whatever I wanted.”

“And what’s that?” Keith breathes.

“You.”

The words connect only after the fact, in the way Keith’s mouth falls open and his face turns a shade redder, and—oh. Oh. There are people watching again. 

He doesn’t care. Keith’s only a few steps away. Shiro takes them in two strides. Keith stumbles back like he thinks maybe Shiro is going to draw a sword and challenge him to a rematch—the clone’s memories will always be with him, beating inside his head as he tries to decide what parts of that intensity were him and what was put there by someone else. 

The truth he steps around is this: it was all him, and even _that_ him wanted this, he thinks as he cups Keith’s face in both hands and kisses him. 

It’s messy. Tooth and tongue. He tastes like coffee. Shiro didn’t know he took it with sugar; he chases the taste and resolves distantly that he’ll learn how Keith takes his coffee and all his favorite foods. Every taste is his. 

Keith’s arms come up around his back, gripping him so tight he can feel Keith’s nails digging into his skin through his shirt. The night before was desperate, uncompromising. This is slow and warm and Shiro takes his time, moderating the pace when Keith tries to force it faster, always in a rush, always scared he’ll run out of time. 

They pull apart when they’re both out of breath. 

Shiro knows his grin is too much. Shit-eating doesn’t begin to cover it. He tries to hide it in Keith’s hair, but then he feels a huff of breath against his neck as Keith starts laughing too. Shiro moans, “Don’t laugh at me, please. I have to go back to the Atlas and face everyone eventually. It’s already bad enough.”

“Would it help if I go with you?”

His hand is suddenly in Shiro’s, squeezing tight. Shiro squeezes back and starts pulling Keith toward the sky harbor where both their ships are parked. “It might help,” he says tentatively. 

Keith pushes at him with his shoulder. “I mean, if you have room for my ship.” 

“Yeah. I saved you a spot and everything.” On his other side, Kosmo shoves under his arm and Shiro scratches at his forehead. “I guess they’ll forgive me if it means we have a dog on board.” 

“Wolf. He’s a wolf, please.” 

“If you insist.” 

Texts roll in. Shiro pulls them up one-handed. The first two are gibberish. The third is sobering. 

_You two are on TV. Congrats._ Hunk sends, cryptic. 

Lance is more forthcoming, less wordy. He sends a clip of the Garrison mess hall, shot over the heads of a gathered crowd. “Wait, they’re going to show it again,” someone says and then the camera zooms in on the screen. The sight is familiar, even through the washed-out image. He and Keith on a bright morning, talking so animatedly it looks like yelling. The words are muffled. 

“You,” he hears himself say, hoarse, and then the lunge forward, Keith’s shocked gaze before his eyes close and—it’s intense, secondhand. It’s embarrassing. 

The crawl on the bottom is half cut off but seems to be making some judgmental comments on how long people can take to act when love is on the line. Shiro hooks his arm around Keith’s shoulders and laughs.

“What’s so funny?” Keith asks. 

“I’ll tell you later.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [[fic on twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir/status/1173386597087055872)]
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!! I still want to post a little extra chapter for this where Shiro is a guest attendee on Keith's Critters. We'll see!! In the mean time, you can find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/arahir) and [tumblr](https://arahir.tumblr.com)!


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